Film

It may have taken almost three years for My Golden Days to make its way from the Cannes Film Festival to British cinemas, but this affecting drama is more than worth the wait. It opens with a middle-aged anthropologist called Paul (Mathieu Amalric) preparing to leave Tajikistan where he has been working for almost a decade. As he gets off the plane in Paris, he is taken to one side and is questioned by a French intelligence agent (André Dussollier). Paul...

Films that fall under the banner of ‘Biblical Epic’ tend to follow the rule that for every Last Temptation of Christ there is a Passion of The Christ. Mary Magdalene is the latest film to fit comfortably under the banner of ‘Biblical Epic’, and it’s from the director Garth Davis of last year’s heartstring twanger, Lion. Rooney Mara plays the titular character, and for the first forty-five minutes she is in every single frame. Mara’s performance is composed and engaging....

Ruben Östlund’s mountain set ski drama, Force Majeure, landed with a bang at Cannes in 2014 and was quickly blanketed by an avalanche of critical success. Three years’ later, the Swedish born director returned and took home the festival’s top prize with The Square, a biting satire of the art world and a surreal, madcap deep dive into the complexities and flaws of humankind. Christian (Claes Bang), the model of Scandi-cool, is handsomely dishevelled in his fitted blazers, open neck...

Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) has forsaken her family fortune to become a London bicycle courier and amateur MMA fighter. After receiving an item from her missing (presumed dead) father, Lara goes in search of a cursed island in Japan carrying ancient treasure and an awful secret. After many of years in need of a revival, a new Tomb Raider game was launched in 2013, taking us to the origins of this pistol wielding archaeologist/thief. Jokes about DD pixels became obsolete;...

Alex Garland’s seat at the directors table is one that he has worked for.  Before he cut his teeth behind the camera with the superbly crafted sci-fi techno thriller, Ex Machina, Garland penned novels and screenplays, the likes of which, The Beach and 28 Days Later, have cemented themselves as cult classics.  With his sophomore feature, Annihilation, Garland swings for the fences and knocks a curve ball out of the park.  It is as ambitious in its mediations as it...

Sometimes Hollywood accidentally makes the same film twice in a very short space of time. Notable 90s examples include Armageddon and Deep Impact, Volcano and Dante’s Peak. CB4 came to US cinemas just a couple of months after Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat, another rap spoof featuring a documentarian telling the story of an NWA like group, played at Sundance 1993. That film would open in June 1994, but I’ll be referencing it here because the similarities and...

There is something of a throwback feel to Gringo that brings to mind the madcap crime capers of the 1990s. Former Ewan McGregor stunt double, Nash Edgerton returns to the director’s chair for the second time with an action comedy that owes a debt to the early work of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers. The film follows Harold (David Oyelowo), a middle management office employee who works for Cannabax, a company developing the first medical marijuana pill. He travels...

At the age of 82, Woody Allen is still showing no signs of slowing down. Year after year, the legendary director keeps on coming up with the good and remains unperturbed by the controversies surrounding him, and year after year hordes of young and not so young actors still line up to work with him on various projects. In his latest film Wonder Wheel, which also happens to be the director’s 49th feature, Allen transports us back to 1950s Coney...

The 2018 Award Season is finally over and after all of the vast number of differing ceremonies and awards that have been given out, I have a few thoughts on 2018’s major winners. I could have chosen any number of awards ceremonies, but it seems fitting to take the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and the BAFTAs into consideration. One constant through all of the three ceremonies was Coco’s success for Best Animated Film, with Pixar striding comfortably home when pitted...