New Movies

Welcomes to a new series on TLE Film. Here, each week, our film writers will have free rein to spotlight a few of the films they've seen recently in capsule reviews. The films could be from this week, they could be from the silent era. Hopefully our week in movies can provide a varied selection of ideas for your future weeks in movies. Candyman Candyman is about many things and gory killings are mostly the vehicle for them rather than...

The Halloween franchise has taken many forms since the first film was released in 1978. In the subsequent years there have been no fewer than seven sequels, two reboots, several novels, and a series of comics. Rather than tangling itself in the franchise’s messy back catalogue, director David Gordon Green pretends that the underwhelming attempts to bring life back into the series never happened. The latest incarnation of Halloween acts as a direct sequel to the original and takes place exactly 40 years after...

Drew Goddard’s Bad Times At The El Royale is a gripping Tarantinoesque Nixon era crime caper in which seven strangers find themselves battling it out through a stormy night at a dilapidated, and tastelessly decorated hotel which straddles the California and Nevada border. Written by Goddard himself, the film presents an ambitious and rather inspired premise, but is ultimately let down by an aimless plot and a decidedly overlong running time. Arriving at the El Royale car park on her...

The opening to First Man is an intense, dizzying few minutes which you hope is a dream sequence as it cannot be real life. The sound is deafening, the rickety nature of the X15 aircraft Armstrong is flying, brought home with full force as he ascends further into the atmosphere than intended. Although we know how First Man ends this is a glimpse at how the turbulent journey started. The fervour surrounding space travel, the moon landings and astronauts is one of an idealistic heroism but here, Chazelle’s opening brings home the idea that the group of highly intelligent engineers who ascended into space were far more...

In real life Columbus, Indiana is a rather unassuming small city located in the American heart land. With a population of around 50,000 people it would be easy to overlook Columbus in favour of the larger and more recognisable cities that can be found not too far away. Academic turned filmmaker Kogonada’s debut film can at first seem a little modest but it doesn’t take long to appreciate the depth and wisdom that Columbus contains. The film centres on a friendship between Jin (John Cho), an American living in...

In Venom, Sony’s latest Marvel offering, director Ruben Fleischer and his writing team seem to have completely failed to grasp the fact that the world has moved on from the old superhero tropes of two-dimensional characters and half-baked ideas that relied too often on a lazy premise and even lazier dialogue. This shift in attitude could be attributed to a number of things, but if we’re going to be completely honest, most of it falls back on the way Disney have handled...

1937. 1954. 1976. 2018. A Star Is Born has had a version for almost every generation of cinema, and the pull of its story can travel across eras with ease. In Bradley Cooper's latest version, he takes the '76 approach of transferring the story to purely music: self-destructive star Jackson Maine (Cooper) stumbles into a back street bar one day in search of more booze. There he comes across a performer in Ally (Lady Gaga) that fascinates him, and one he wants...

Having made her debut with stranger than fiction doc The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle appears to have almost literally stumbled on the genesis of her first fiction feature. She ran in to the all girl skateboarding crew Skate Kitchen on the New York subway and, fascinated by them, bought them coffee and began to hang out with them. This led initially to the short film That One Day and eventually to this film; a blend of fact and fiction with the...

In Björn Runge’s The Wife, Glenn Close offers a truly outstanding performance as the long suffering wife of an insufferably vain novelist (played by Jonathan Pryce). Adapted for the screen by Jane Anderson from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name, the film is a beautifully understated, thought provoking and deeply affecting study in codependency and deceit, which is only slightly let down by a needlessly stagey style. After nearly forty years of marriage, Joan and Joe Castleman (Close and Pryce) seem very happy...