Diminutive 88-year old filmmaker Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I) returns to the screen with the whimsical road-trip documentary Faces Places; her first feature film in nine years. Here she teams up with 33-year old French visual artist and film director who goes by simply JR. He’s known for his large scale photographic murals, and…
Who would have thought that one of the biggest – and tawdriest – sports scandals of the 20th Century could play out as Greek tragedy? But Australian director Craig Gillespie (The Finest Hours) manages that – and a lot more – with I, Tonya. This ingeniously devised film delves into the life of Tonya Harding,…
Maze Runner: The Death Cure concludes the generic dystopian saga based on the popular series of novels written by James Dashner. And unlike a couple of other YA adaptations, at least here the producers resisted the temptation to split the final film into two parts. We were first introduced to a group of heroes, known as…
Swinging Safari reunites writer and director Stephan Elliott with key personnel from his The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994). They include producer Al Clark, production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, editor Sue Blainey and composer Guy Gross. New to the team are hair and makeup designer Rick Findlater and cinematographer Brad Shield. It’s…
One of the world’s most inventive filmmakers produces one of the year’s most inventive films in The Shape of Water. This vivid fantasy from Guillermo del Toro is both a loving homage to cinema and an engrossing tale in its own right. From his first feature, Cronos, del Toro has been fascinated by monsters of one…
A moral conundrum and the consequences choice are at the heart of The Commuter. This is the fourth collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson (after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night). Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a 60-year-old middle manager at a faceless insurance company. Like so many hard-working family men, he’s at financial breaking point. His son…
Steven Spielberg’s latest drama, The Post, looks at the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers. These leaked documents showed the full extent of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War over four decades. They also revealed how successive administrations had lied to the public and covered up the truth. This is a tense thriller about government…
Darkest Hour is a kind of backgrounder on Winston Churchill’s “never surrender” speech. It also touches on the flotilla dispatched to fetch the British troops from the beach at Dunkirk (as to which, see Dunkirk). But this showy biopic has too much emphasis on levity. Joe Wright (Atonement) directs from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten (The…
The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature is the sequel to 2014’s original animation. It begins with Surly Squirrel (voiced by Will Arnett), his pug friend Precious (Maya Rudolph) and his best friend Buddy the rat living it up in a recently closed nut shop. Food is abundant and life is good … until the shop…
All the Money in the World is prolific filmmaker Ridley Scott’s dramatization of the real life kidnapping of J Paul Getty III. He was the 16-year-old grandson of oil magnate J Paul Getty, the richest man in the world (Christopher Plummer). In 1973, the teenage Getty (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher) was living in…
