Film

Towards the end of Pitch Perfect 3, Brittany Snow’s Chloe declares to her fellow Bellas – without even the vaguest hint of irony – that it’s time for them all to start new chapters and move on with their lives; a conclusion many members of the audience are likely to have already come to some 60-70 minutes earlier. For even if you consider yourself to be a hardcore fan of the Pitch Perfect franchise – and as someone who could...

Warning: Though this review is spoiler free, the film’s set-up is referenced throughout. “Good guys, bad guys, these are all just words,” says Benicio Del Toro’s inscrutable space-hacker DJ about a third of the way through The Last Jedi; his own allegiances, tellingly, enigmatically blurred between the dark and the light. The Star Wars saga means so many things to so many people, but its narrative and thematic crux has ostensibly been the same since George Lucas first introduced us...

A family are celebrating Christmas in style by building a life-sized Millennium Falcon - on their ROOF. Colby Powell and his four children built the 28.5 ft long, 20 ft around, and 5 ft thick replica of the spaceship used by Han Solo in the sci-fi saga. With help from family and friends, they also created a 23-foot replica of the Death Star on top his house two years ago when Episode 7 the Force Awakens was released, which was...

Bingo: The King of the Mornings is directed by the Oscar-nominated editor, Daniel Rezende, who worked on Meirelles’s City of God and Bingo is his directorial debut and Brazil’s official Academy Awards entry for best foreign film. It is ultimately a redemption drama, based on the true story of the former porn actor Arlindo Barreto, who in the 80s was a huge hit throughout Brazil playing the character of “Bozo”, a clown on Saturday morning children’s TV. Barreto played “Bozo”...

When you visit a museum that occupies the fields of science or natural history there is often a screening room playing a documentary about the state of the world or showcasing one of the wonders of the world. It is these films that Mountain a documentary, funnily enough, about mountains from Australian film-maker Jennifer Peedom reminded me of. There are some truly stunning images captured by Peedom in Mountain as her camera swoops and soars over the highest peaks in...

Dubbed a “ramen western,” Tampopo shares the narrative skeleton of, you guessed, a western. Substitute gun slinging for noodle kneading and you’ve taken a step towards the flavour of Jûzô Itami’s film. But, like a steaming bowl of noodle soup, Tampopo is a film for the soul packed with the kind of hearty warmth that you want to take a bath in. Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) is a single mum who, after the death of her husband, has taken over his...

By Michael McNulty Put down the red carpet and welcome onto the world stage, Afghanistan’s man of the hour, or so he’d have you believe.  Sitting at the centre of Sonia Kronlund’s charming documentary, The Prince of Nothingwood, is Salim Shaheen, the corpulent, larger than life writer, director, actor and all round star, the kind of man who, if allowed the opportunity, would take centre stage in the life of the person standing next to him. Roger Corman meets Ed...

There is an inescapable sadness that runs to the core of Mountains May Depart, the new film from director Jia Zhang-ke. It’s ambitious in its plotting, with three sequential narratives set in differing time periods. The first, set in 1999, is the most intriguing, with characters Liang (Liang Jingdong) and Jingsheng (Zhang Yi) vying for the affections of central figure, Tao, played by Jia’s long-term collaborator and wife, Zhao Tao. Liang and Tao are already dating, but Jingsheng is trying...

Coming from director-provocateur Sion Sono, who wrote the script 17 years prior to the film’s production, watching Why Don’t You Play in Hell? is akin to slamming a handful of uppers, chasing them down with a flaming shot of Sambuca, and diving, whilst laughing manically, into a samurai sword swinging mosh-pit. It’s a madcap orgy of violence, a blood soaked delight, and by the time the credits roll you won’t quite know what’s hit you. Why Don’t You Play in...