An intense and visceral experience, Dunkirk is war up-close and personal like few films before it. Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) writes, directs and co-produces the action-packed drama. The picture opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by German forces. Trapped on the beach at Dunkirk in northern France with their backs to…
It’s one of those vagaries of film distribution that we sometimes get two films released at the same time with similar plots and ideas. Within the space of a couple of weeks we get two road trip movies. Both feature two people on a journey through some of Europe’s most picturesque areas. They sample the history, culture…
The outsider looking in is one of Sofia Coppola’s directorial trademarks. From Scarlett Johansson’s bewildered American in Tokyo in Lost in Translation to the teenagers breaking into millionaires’ homes in The Bling Ring, she seems to have an affinity for the “other”. In The Beguiled however, she takes the concept in a very different direction….
British director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) was raised on a diet of Hollywood genre films, but his quirky sensibility and sense of humour subverts the usual tropes of the genre. His Hot Fuzz was a loving homage to those American crime films he enjoyed watching. A decade on he returns to the crime…
I’m really not ashamed to admit that I’m always looking forward to watch a live-action rendition of a Disney cartoon. We’ve seen a few of those already passing by. One more succesful than the other. Or better, one I liked more than the other. Maleficent, The BFG and especially The Jungle Book were, in my…
The most problematic of the Marvel superheroes is given a reboot in Spider-Man: Homecoming. When I say problematic, I mean because of his movie history more than anything else. In just the past 15 years, there have been no less than six movies featuring the teenage web-slinger. Sam Raimi’s 2002 – 07 trilogy starring Tobey…
One of the truisms of gambling says the house always wins. However, with The House – a supposed comedy about an ordinary family that set up an illegal underground casino in the leafy streets of suburbia – it’s the audience who are the losers. Let’s face it – when was the last time Will Ferrell made…
With the successful Despicable Me franchise, new kids on the block, Illumination Studios, have rivalled animation giants Pixar and Dreamworks who once set the bar. The success of the Despicable Me franchise is largely due to the scene-stealing antics of the mischievous, diminutive and simple minded yellow creatures known as the minions, who talk in gibberish. The…
A low-rent noir thriller with some questionable acting, Detour nevertheless keeps the twists coming. The film focuses on Harper (Tye Sheridan – X-Men: Apocalypse), a tense, privileged young law student. The young man suspects his stepdad, Vincent (Stephen Moyer) caused a car accident, leaving Harper’s mother in a coma. Harper is livid that Vincent has barely visited his…
If you can follow the intricate (at times maddening) plot in Transformers: The Last Knight then “You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din!”. At least that is until Anthony Hopkins’ character pulls together the threads well into the film. It is the fifth film in the series, following on from 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. …
