Film

By Sam Inglis Most of my go to Christmas movies are the same as anyone else’s: It’s A Wonderful Life, Gremlins, Muppet Christmas Carol, Die Hard, Die Hard 2 (it’s underrated, and as much a Christmas movie as the first). Then there’s this. This is the Manos of Christmas movies: It’s terrible, has been on MST3K, and is great fun with or without Joel and the bots making jokes. It’s an irresistibly silly title and, happily, Santa Claus Conquers The...

With family overseas, Christmas time has often meant a fair deal of travel, travel that has always involved international flights. When my family was based in the Middle East, I was often fortunate enough to find myself cozying into a long haul flight on an airline that boasted a great in-flight entertainment system, with a library of films that would put the BFI’s archives to shame. However, when my parents moved to Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, I had...

“Buddy the Elf, what’s your favourite colour?” I have wanted to answer the telephone and say that to someone ever since I first watched Elf, but considering it would probably make me look like a mad man I haven’t. Instead, I quote it in my head every time someone mentions the film. The line itself is silly – no one needs to answer the phone in that way, but Will Ferrell’s beloved character is just the right side of cheerful...

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...