Film

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...

Expanding his short film, writer, director and actor Jim Cummings plays Jim, a cop who has a meltdown while trying to give a eulogy at his mother’s funeral. From there, he struggles to hold things together in his job and in his personal life, as he tries to bond with his daughter and fight his ex-wife’s request for sole custody. Right from the start, Thunder Road throws you with its tone. We first find a clearly distraught Jim stumbling through...

Jacob Suttie, 4, loves to dress up as Dr Peter Venkman, complete with an original proton pack and ghost meter from the 80s

PiggyI’ve always been a fan of films and TV series’ that depict the experience of being a teenager through the lens of horror. Being a teenager often sucks, and horror has always existed, at least in part, to help us parse and process parts of our lives we don’t like or don’t want to confront. Piggy starts in this place, with an overweight teenage girl going for a swim, only to be spotted and targeted for some pretty vicious bullying...

Analysis of the 1,273 tweets director Rian Johnson received seven months from the film's released last December found all positive and neutral comments were genuine.

MaliceAh the yuppie thriller, a preserve of the late 80s and early 90s that dealt with the fear of home, family and prosperity being invaded by an outside source. There was an attempt to revive the subgenre a few years back (which failed with the release of The Resident, which played like it had sat on a shelf since 1991), but Malice, along with our earlier subject Indecent Proposal, was one of the later gasps of the original cycle. It...

The war film genre is brimming with hundreds of great movie titles. Classic films such as Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Saving Private Ryan are a few that come to mind. The problem is you've seen all these movies! And as good as they are, there are so many more war movies that never got the full attention they deserved. Taking that into account, here is a list of 8 superb films you probably haven’t seen but absolutely need to...

CatcallsAfter flashing a couple of teenage girls, a man gets more than he bargained for in this well made horror from Kate Dolan. Like a lot of shorts, Catcalls feels a bit more like a scene from a feature that might be in its director’s future than a truly self-contained eight minute story, but that’s no bad thing in this case. Catcalls fits right in with not just the rising tide of female, and indeed feminist, driven horror but with...

When his beloved wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is murdered in front of him by a gang of ‘Jesus freak’ bikers on industrial strength LSD, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) goes on a rage, booze and drug fuelled rampage of bloody revenge. Just look at that summary. How cool does that sound? I should love this. I should be shouting from the rooftops that it’s a hallucinatory new exploitation classic that can stand with the best of the recent tributes to the...