Film

For those who love film, Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s documentary, The Cinema Travellers, will find a special place in your heart. Through the lives of three men, who are bound by celluloid, the beauty of film, and its projection, we are provided an intimate, fly on the wall look at travelling cinemas in the rural parts of India’s Maharashtra state. There is the shrewd businessman, exhibiting films at many of India’s religious festivals, the charitable showman who screens films...

Richard Linklater’s latest film is a sequel, of sorts, to Hal Ashby’s 1971 great, The Last Detail, which starred a young Jack Nicholson. That film was concerned with questions around the ideas of legacy & impermanence, and Last Flag Flying continues this tradition, whilst also being shot through with a hit of pure Linklater in the form of a hangout film. Ashby’s film centres on two US sailors transporting a third to a military prison and Linklater’s film shares a...

After beginning with The Hunger Games in 2012, the tenth and (*prayers*) final film amongst the teens facing dystopian peril YA subgenre belongs to Maze Runner: The Death Cure. The Maze Runner films have always sat somewhere in the middle, never enjoying the cultural capital of The Hunger Games franchise, nor the career destroying banality of the Divergent trilogy. 20th Century Fox have also had the decency to adapt the third book in James Dashner's trilogy into one final film...

If you have ever wondered what Wallace & Gromit’s ancestors would have looked like then the latest feature from the much loved Aardman Animation Studio will have you catered for. Set on prehistoric earth, somewhere near Manchester, Early Man follows a rabbit hunting tribe and its inquisitive and likable member Dug (Eddie Redmayne). They live in a green and luscious crater on what is an otherwise barren planet. One day, their idyllic lives are ruined as the more developed Bronze...

A curious oddity in more ways than one, Downsizing heralds writer/director Alexander Payne’s return to original storytelling, his script here being the first since his debut feature, Citizen Ruth, to not be adapted from a novel. Like Ruth, Downsizing is a gutsy contemplation of American society, but one that’s unlikely to inspire the sort of profound musings that are prominent in his more perceptive works: it isn’t as eccentric as Election or Sideways, nor as sharp as Nebraska & About...

LET US SPEAK LESS OF FAMOUS MEN Darkest Hour is the second film of the past twelve months about Winston Churchill, and the second about the evacuation at Dunkirk. As it continues a cinema run and Gary Oldman looks forward to his inevitable Oscar nomination, many will gladly accept the comfort of a film that ticks every anodyne biopic box. The film’s drama was occasionally engaging, sometimes silly, and sometimes boring. The subject was lionised. I learned a little and...

Joe Dante loves movies. That’s one of the defining qualities of his filmography. He made his debut 50 years ago with The Movie Orgy, a seven hour compilation film of clips from movies and tv. He later re-edited that film to ‘just’ four and a half hours, but it remains all but impossible to see. His debut proper was Hollywood Boulevard, in which he and co-director Alan Arkush parodied the experience of working for Roger Corman (the fictional company in...

It is tempting to call Daphne an anti-romantic comedy but, while it is that to some degree, it’s also a much more complex and far reaching character study. Daphne (Emily Beecham) is a 31 year old chef living and working in London. The film is essentially a slice of her life, a brief period in which she’s dealing with casual sex, a potential relationship with a bouncer (Nathaniel Martello-White) who might promise more than that, a mother (Geraldine James) who...

The melancholic tones David Bowie mournfully set the mood for Jimmy Murakami’s revered adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ traumatic graphic novel. Originally released in 1986, when the world was gripped by the threat of nuclear war, When The Wind Blows was celebrated at the time for its humane consideration of a horrific hypothetical that many believed could soon become a devastating reality. Briggs pivots his narrative around the “Protect and Survive” information booklet that was available at the time, and designed...