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…
