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...

The critic Roger Ebert once said, “movies are like a machine that generates empathy”, which perhaps explains why so many of us feel compelled to turn towards the loving embrace of cinema to console us in times of great trouble. Yet somehow, in much the same way he has seemingly managed to encroach on every other sphere of our existence since deciding to run for President, Donald Trump has managed to ruin this most comforting of pleasures too. These days...

Tim Hunter has, over the past 30 odd years, worked predominantly in television, directing episodes for stand out shows including Mad Men, Scream, and everything in between.  However, in the 1980s he directed several feature films, one of which was none other than the eerily dark, nihilistic teen drama, River’s Edge. The film is based on a the real life murder of Macy Renee Conrad, who was strangled to death by 16 year old high school student Anthony Jacques Broussard,...

My Life Story, directed by Julien Temple, is a soaring success.  It is the filmed stage show of Graham “Suggs” McPherson, frontman for the iconic 80s’ Ska-Pop band, Madness. Coming in the form of a one man show that expertly blends archival footage, animation and dramatized re-enactment, the show is an autobiographical account of Suggs’ life story structured loosely around his quest to discover more about the father he never had. It is a personal, sprawling spoken word documentary that...