Film

Over the years, as it has accumulated two sequels and as Robert Rodriguez’ career has grown and diversified, El Mariachi’s backstory has arguably become better known and more important than the film itself. I had seen Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico, but until watching it to research this piece, I had never seen El Mariachi before, but I was very much aware of the legend of how it was made, with Rodriguez literally selling his blood in...

Warning: this review contains a possible spoiler The premise of Polish 'documentary' You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (original title: Nawet nie wiesz, jak bardzo cie kocham) is that an adult daughter Hanna (Hanna Maciąg) and mother Ewa (Ewa Szymczyk) are seeing renowned therapist Bogdan De Barbaro after growing apart since Ewa's divorce and increasingly distant behaviour hurt Hanna deeply. Visually the film is deliberately barren, alternating between close-ups of the trio in a windowless, colourless room. This...

Sometimes, it can feel like a hard slog looking for a great film to enjoy on a Friday night after a long week.  More often than not we turn to the cinema to get our film fix, and rightly so, because every week, especially at the moment, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find something interesting.  The sad truth is, if you come from a family like mine, when you’re not donning your best dress for a Friday night outing to...

Lady Bird is a film that deals with the trials and tribulations of first love, losing your virginity, and the final year of high school in a way that is rarely seen on the big screen. Each section of the film is given its own space to breathe, and although the film sticks to its tight 93 minute running time, no scene feels rushed. The film in fact should be commended for leaving you wanting more, for making you want...

In eyes of Guillermo del Toro, ‘monster’ is a relative term. So when Richard Jenkins’ Giles, our nominal narrator, tells us that The Shape of Water is a story “of love & loss, and the monster who tried to destroy it all,” it would be unwise to assume that the antagonist he refers to is the piscine humanoid at the heart of this otherworldly fable. The latest offering from del Toro’s beloved cabinet of curiosities, The Shape of Water is...

“Just because something works, doesn’t mean it cannot be improved,” we’re told early on in Ryan Coogler’s courageous new entry into the Marvel canon. Loyal fans who have stuck with the series since the first Iron Man will no doubt be relieved to hear that this exhilarating blockbuster yarn doesn’t deviate too far from the studio’s winning formula, but it is those whose voices are callously sidelined so often in such big-budget fare, and crucially given such definition here, who...

“I’m sweating here. Roasting. Boiling. Baking. Sweltering. It’s like a sauna. Furnace. You could fry an egg on my stomach,” narrates Ray Winstone’s Gary “Gal” Dove, before The Stranglers “Peaches” kicks in and he takes a break from crisping himself under the white-hot heat of the Spanish sun to place an iced hand towel over the nether regions he has concealed behind a skimpy pair of yellow swimming trunks. So begins Jonathan Glazer’s cooler than cool, gangster-heist, love story hybrid:...

Based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, Pad Man is the biopic of Lakshmikant Chauhan (Akshay Kumar), the man who dreamt of manufacturing and distributing subsidized sanitary pads to the women of India after seeing the dirty rags his wife was using during menstruation. Due to the taboos surrounding menstruation in his small village and across India in general; it is not just economics, but social mores Lakshmi must do battle against. What may not seem at first cinematic material...

Where most stories concerning plucky underdogs either see them miraculously come out on top or heroically fail with credit and respect intact, The Mercy shows us a third outcome that is much more realistic and true to life. For more often than not our grand plans do not turn out as we may have hoped, and we are left fearing ridicule and failure. The desire to cover up our mistakes is a common one that has consumed us all at...