Film

A tree sparks a spat between neighbours in Haffstein Gunnar Sigurðsson black comedy Under the Tree. When Atli (Steinþór Hróar Steinþórsson), husband to Agnes (Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir) and father of young daughter Asa (Sigrídur Sigurpálsdóttir Scheving), is caught by his wife having a crafty wank early one morning to a video of him and an ex-girlfriend having sex, he is thrown out on the street.  With nowhere to go, but home, Atli heads for his parent’s place where an altogether...

In my article for the BANNED! Series on The Toolbox Murders, I talked about how, when I was a kid, I wasn’t able to watch many films that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. That was why I considered the 12 certificate - which came in in 1989, the first release being Tim Burton’s Batman - a great innovation. There had always been such a wide gulf between PG and 15, and it was ridiculously easy to fall into the...

Filmmakers have a strange habit of allowing the most horrific events to take place in the most beautiful of surroundings. This is most certainly the case with Sicilian Ghost Story, which is set in the woodlands and lakes that border one of the titular island’s small towns. The film centres around Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez), a 13 year old boy, and Luna (Julia Jedlikowska), a spirited girl in his class who has taken a liking to him. Giuseppe is sensitive and...

Dominic Savage delivers a noble if somewhat tepid character study of a desperate housewife in The Escape. Tara (Gemma Arterton) is a married mother of two.  She lives in the quiet, dull rabbit hutches of suburban London.  It is a lonely existence, and despite her family, she is isolated.  Her husband, Mark (Dominic Cooper), is the self-absorbed breadwinner, a man blind to his partner’s immeasurable unhappiness.  For Tara, life is a cycle of monotonous routine, the school run, the weekly...

I have no rhythm and I can’t carry a note, let alone a tune, but still, I love music. As much as I love music in and of itself, as something to listen to while I’m writing a review for instance, it’s at gigs that I find myself most transported and engaged by an artist. A great gig is unifying; for the three minutes of THAT song that you and the rest of the crowd have waited for, everyone is...

They say that size doesn’t matter, but that’s unlikely to be of much consolation to the makers of Ant-Man and The Wasp. For having been requisitioned to follow on from the gargantuan critical and commercial success of both Black Panther & Avengers: Infinity War, there’s no denying that, true to the heroes of its title, this 20th instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels a little, well… diminutive. The story follows on from the events of Captain America: Civil War,...

Bride Courtney McMillian, 28, has been a fan of the dinosaur flick since she was a little girl and was thrilled to realise her partner Billy McMillian, 26, shared her dedication when they began dating in 2013.

It seems that every comedian with a movie or two under their belt turns pretty quickly to the romantic comedy, and with good reason. The rom-com is a fascinating genre, at once rigid in its long established rules and structure, yet infinitely malleable in the genre hybridisations that can be created within it. Mike Myers’ attempt at this most mainstream of genres, So I Married an Axe Murderer, its title might suggest, falls on the darker end of the spectrum....

The 1993 murder of James Bulger was shocking both in its brutality and in that its perpetrators were just ten years old. It seemed that both the public and the press were at a loss to understand how it happened, how two children ended up committing such a violent murder. When something like this happens there is, I think, a need to find something to blame, to find a problem that will explain the event away and allow us to...