Film

“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...

In this Russian drama, a couple in the process of a bitter divorce has selfishly ignored their twelve-year-old son Alexey (Matvey Novikov) in pursuit of new relationships. When the boy goes missing, the pair are finally forced to acknowledge his existence before they can continue with their lives. Father Boris (Aleksey Rozin) comes across as selfish and uncaring, mother Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) worse. She emphasises how much she wishes she had aborted Alexey in the womb with savage glee, giving...

“This experiment could unleash chaos” remarks Donal Logue’s faceless news pundit about a third of the way through this unexpected, and frankly unnecessary addition to the Cloverfield saga. Though the first two films – 2008’s Cloverfield and 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane – didn’t share any direct DNA within their separate narratives, they did both function as effective post-9/11 paranoia pieces; melding blockbuster thrills with timely considerations on how we can feed on and be consumed, both individually & collectively, by...

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today. It’s coooooold out there every day. On Friday we discovered that the winter of 2018 will continue for another six weeks, based on the fact that a Groundhog - a type of large ground Squirrel - saw its shadow. To be honest, it’s probably not the least accurate weather forecasting system we use. I’d wager that if you’re reading this anywhere other than the...

Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, set in a dystopic near future, is a sleek sci-fi thriller that imagines a world where eugenics dictate people’s standing in society. It was Niccol’s directorial debut, released before The Truman Show - the script for which Niccol’s would earn an academy nomination - and made on a relatively tight budget of $36 million.  It was a box office flop, only recouping roughly $12 million and was poorly received by critics.  However, over the years Niccol’s film continues...

Directed by London Has Fallen writer Christian Gudegas and staring Gerard Butler, Den Of Thieves is the sort of testosterone laden action flick that doesn’t seem to care much about offering anything resembling a coherent storyline, opting instead for a lazily constructed and needlessly meandering narrative, which in the end only succeeds in alienating even the most ardent of action fans. Furthermore, the film falls at the first hurdle by its inability to decide which story it wants to tell,...