We’ve finally made it to Oscar night after what has felt like one of the longest awards season in recent memory. It’s also become one of the most exciting as frontrunners have failed to emerge in multiple major categories making it feel like it could truly be anyone’s game. While the length of the season…
The BAFTAs once again proved themselves to be definitively their own entity, that, whilst a core part of the overall awards season and seen by many in some ways as an indicator for the Oscars, are still willing to go their own way when it comes to some big awards. The biggest surprise of the…
Ah the cinema, that famously social activity where you enter a dark room and sit in complete silence for a couple of hours. People are afraid to do a lot of things alone, and the cinema seems to sit high on that list for many. It is reductive to say that there aren’t social benefits…
Unusually arriving before the BAFTA nominations (we’ll see how those shake out next week), the nominations for the pinnacle prize of Awards Season have finally been announced. In what has been a fairly steady and predictable season so far, there aren’t too many major snubs or surprises that haven’t been alluded to in the precursors;…
When I got home from seeing Wicked: For Good, I turned on my TV and happened to catch the glorious final 10 minutes of the cinematic masterpiece that is Mamma Mia! The contrast of one movie musical with another got me thinking about how important it is for the actors to be strong singers and the impact that…
With the trailer released for the live action Moana, it feels like the nail in the coffin for Disney’s originality. We’ve been plagued by these live action remakes for a decade now and whilst at first they felt like a relatively harmless novelty, now, with a remake of a film not even a decade old, they…
Every filmmaker’s dream is to receive the glowing reviews bestowed upon Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, but every rose has its thorn and sometimes critical acclaim can be the downfall of an audience’s experience. One Battle After Another rolled into cinemas on the back of seemingly near-universal five-star reviews and proclamations that it wasn’t only the…
I am not the first to bemoan our increasing lack of shared experience and our increasingly fractured, algorithm-driven culture, but the honestly transcendent experience I had at the Hamnet gala premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, really drove home what we risk losing. The London Film Festival is my favourite place to be. It always has…
The audience you’re with can have a big effect on your film experience, and I don’t just mean whether or not you get some inconsiderate popcorn rustlers, drink slurpers, mid-movie texters, man-spreaders or even vapers in your screen. Especially for films which are designed to evoke more audible reactions from their audiences (for example laughs…
I’m going to start this feature by admitting that part of the reason for writing it is annoyance (albeit I had been planning to write a similar feature for a while). I watched Alex Garland’s Annihilation on Netflix last week and I am annoyed. I am annoyed that I didn’t have the option to see…
