Just one year after the double whammy of Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos is back with his own particular brand of weird and another great collaboration with Emma Stone. A more contained story than their previous efforts, Bugonia is nonetheless full of big ideas. We meet Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a beekeeper with a burning vengeance against a…
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…
Springsteen finally joins his iconic peers in getting the biopic treatment and, to its credit, Deliver Me from Nowhere decides to take a less common approach to the genre. It is an admirable effort but doesn’t dive deep enough to justify itself. The film chronicles the making of Springsteen’s (Jeremy Allen White) album Nebraska, a decidedly unusual left…
After an incredible run of films of the calibre and ilk seldom seen, Luca Guadagnino returns with After the Hunt, which arrived with a provocative premise, stellar cast and a presumed great directorial match, but faded quickly into one of the year’s biggest disappointments. The film centres itself on Alma (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at…
The comedic trailers and posters for Roofman make it seem like a stark departure from Derek Cianfrance’s tragedy-skewing filmography, but don’t be fooled. The emotion of Roofman sneaks up on you; for all the feel-good fun, when the rug gets pulled out from under these characters, you’ll find Cianfrance’s capacity to twist your heartstrings is…
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…
Bradley Cooper returns to the director’s chair with a smaller-scale story than his previous outings and he further proves his directorial prowess with this perfectly-formed, hilarious and tender relationship study. The kind of adult comedy-drama that feels as though it is from a bygone age, Is This Thing On? is a beautifully crafted breath of fresh air.…
Arriving on the heels of breathless praise from the North American festivals, I was lucky enough to attend the gala premiere of Hamnet at the London Film Festival. Expectations were high, as was the buzz inside Royal Festival Hall, and the film delivered in full force with its audience left emotionally devastated yet bursting full of life.…
The Merc with a Mouth is back, with all of the trademark wit, crudity and fourth-wall breaking self-awareness that we know and love, but with one crucial difference. This film doesn’t enter the multiplexes as the cunning underdog hoping to connect; it comes with a raging fire of fans and expectations, and with a considerably…
The award-winning team behind Juno and Young Adult have returned to give us another intimate glimpse into a time in a woman’s life: motherhood. In Tully, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody have crafted a tender yet seemingly brutally honest account of the trials and tribulations that come with having small children in a character study that lends…
