The clumsily titled Solo: A Star Wars Story takes us all the way back to the origin of one Han Solo, the dashing and sardonic space smuggler made famous by Harrison Ford in 1977's iconic Star Wars, since become one the biggest film franchises of all time. After escaping the hellish industrial planet of his upbringing, Han falls…
After his tenderly passionate debut Weekend and the strained marriage-in-crisis drama 45 Years - led by British New Wave icons Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling – Andrew Haigh continues his ascendancy into the upper tier of British screen talents with his third film and first transatlantic foray: an exploration of horse-rearing culture in the Pacific Northwest…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe peaks as the band of heroes take on an evil villain threatening intergalactic annihilation. Infinity War, the latest instalment in the Avengers series takes place several years after the events of 2016's Captain America: Civil War. The Avengers are as fragmented as ever and scattered across the world but find themselves forced to…
With a similar precision to the sharp blade seen in the film’s opening moments (helping create one of the most arresting depictions of equine violence since The Godfather), Thoroughbreds immediately announces its arrival into the annals of teen angst dramas, playing out as a brooding bildungsroman of female friendship and murderous pacts that translates as…
Steven Spielberg’s homage to the golden age of digital pop culture is a symphony of sounds heard before- but that’s far from a bad thing. Ernest Cline’s debut novel published in 2011 was a runaway success on various levels, not least for re-igniting public interest in science fiction literature but also for starting a bidding…
Wes Anderson’s oeuvre is a genre unto itself, with the name of the director serving as a shorthand for an accessible mode of twenty-first century auteur filmmaking. Anderson’s distinctive trademarks of extreme close-ups, dolly zooms, whip pans, and symmetrical composition have proven so singular that Anderson’s tastes and iconography arguably constitute a kind of gateway…
Woody Allen’s latest offering, Wonder Wheel, is a frustrating watch. Allen revisits the Coney Island theme park in which Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer grew up and introduces us to Ginny Rannell (Kate Winslet), her husband Humpty (Jim Belushi) and Ginny’s son, Richie (Jack Gore). Ginny and Humpty are unhappily married, struggling to hide their contempt…
One of the most consistently undervalued British screen talents and a figure whose career has been sadly hampered by the constraints of the Hollywood machine (her original attachment to the film of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones fell apart and her insane-sounding Moby Dick-in space remains in development hell), Scottish director Lynne Ramsay returns with…
That the world of espionage is bursting with stranger than fiction stories should come as no surprise. A ring of Russian sleeper agents in the US arrested in one fell swoop, including the glamorous Anna Chapman. A British code breaker found dead, locked inside a holdall in his own bath. A former KGB spy dying…
The eponymous Post of Steven Spielberg's latest feature is The Washington Post newspaper which in 1971 transformed itself from a local publication to a national paper when, under the leadership of publisher Katherine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), defied an injunction by the Richard Nixon administration to publish the remainder of the…
