Film

Isabel Coixet adapts The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name, in her latest Goya award-winning film. Coixet crafts an interesting film, one that curiously marshals satisfaction and frustration.  Despite its predictability, it remains ambitious in its scope, and touches on subjects that feel both timely and important. It’s 1959.  The location, a nondescript British coastal town, dreary, stiflingly small and populated by narrow-minded, conservative townsfolk.  Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a middle-aged widower whose husband was killed in the...

How do you approach making a follow up to a film that didn’t need a follow up? Do you stay true to the themes and tone of the original or forge a new path across the Mexican desert? Stefano Sollima’s Sicario 2: Soldado opts to stay true to what made the first film so unexpectedly brilliant. The preceding film had been a taught, atmospheric thriller as Denis Villeneuve guided the audience through two hours of miserable, brilliant action. The fact...

In his debut feature as director, actor Stephen Moyer (True Blood, The Double) offers a decently put together and beautifully acted family drama which seems to tick all the right boxes thematically, but sadly fails to completely convince due to its overwrought and slightly-too-meandering screenplay. Written by actor turned screenwriter Denis O’Hare (True Blood, American Horror Story), The Parting Glass follows a day in the life of a group of adult siblings and their father, as they come to terms...

Last week I talked about Jurassic Park and how, at 11, it felt like my movie. Sleepless in Seattle isn’t that. It’s my mum’s movie. I honestly don’t know where I got the movie bug, none of my family are cinephiles. My parents, generally speaking, like their movies safe. I used to have to assure my mother that a film would have a happy ending if there was even the tiniest bit of suspense during it. My folks are great,...

Fatih Akin’s new German drama about a woman hellbent on seeking revenge after the murder of her family is a rather contrived, facile and at times overly melodramatic production that could have easily benefited from losing some schmaltz in favour of a more nuanced narrative. Staring Diane Kruger and co-written by Akin (Soul Kitchen, Goodbye Berlin) and screenwriter Hark Bohm, In The Fade presents an interesting enough premise, but sadly falls at the first hurdle by failing to come across...

Billy (Alex Lawther) is a flamboyant gay kid, largely estranged from his father (Larry Pine), until he has to move for the last year of high school when his beloved mother (Bette Midler) is ‘taken ill’. In a conservative school, Billy doesn’t fit in and is at one point beaten so badly that he ends up in a coma. When Billy recovers Flip (Ian Nelson), the high school football star he has become unlikely friends with, suggests that he tone...

One can’t help but feel that Sara Driver has missed an opportunity for a truly exciting and insightful documentary about one of the 20th century’s most interesting and revolutionary artists with her first film since her feature, When Pigs Fly. Although the title suggests an exploration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s later teenage years, Driver fails to deliver.  A majority of the films modest 78-minute runtime dedicates itself to exploring the emergence and proliferation of New York’s colourful art scene circa the...

It would be easy to dismiss Ocean’s 8 as being little more than the cynical cash in it appears on the surface; a crass attempt to squeeze a few more bucks out of a stagnating franchise by assuming the façade of a contemporary ‘woman’s picture’. Indeed while this critic doesn’t concur with such musings, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t in the back of my mind as I settled in to watch this soft reboot-cum-sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s...

When I was very little I wanted to be a paleontologist. By the age of 11 this had changed, because I had become obsessed with movies, but I was still very interested in dinosaurs and would pick up fossils whenever we went to a (British) beach on holiday. I had quite a collection of Ammonites. This, along with that obsession with movies I mentioned, meant that the looming release of Jurassic Park was one of the most important moments of...