For anyone with even the slightest fear of spiders, the thought of being trapped inside an apartment building overrun by the eight-legged creatures is probably enough to induce a cold sweat. It’s a premise that practically writes itself, and one that Crawlers, the latest addition to the increasingly crowded arachnid horror subgenre, wastes little time…
At a time when political absurdity has become so commonplace that reality frequently feels beyond parody, the return of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Ali G should, in theory, provide the perfect opportunity to expose the increasingly ridiculous state of modern society. After all, Baron Cohen built his reputation on confronting prejudice through comedy, using the apparent…
History may remember D-Day as one of the defining victories of the Second World War, but for the men tasked with deciding when it should take place, victory was anything but certain. Before Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, before the sacrifices and triumphs that would become etched into collective memory, there were weather…
Few films have courted controversy quite as enthusiastically as Ken Russell’s The Devils, and even fewer have emerged from decades of censorship feeling quite so alarmingly relevant. First released in 1971, Russell’s feverish examination of religious fanaticism, sexual repression and institutional corruption has long existed under the shadow of its own notoriety, with its most…
For all the spectacle and larger-than-life personalities that have traditionally defined comic book cinema, there’s something refreshing about a superhero universe willing to embrace the ugliness of its own mythology. And in the case of Clayface, ugliness is very much the point. Unrelentingly bleak, frequently grotesque and entirely uninterested in providing audiences with the usual…
There’s something inherently heartbreaking about the idea of a machine understanding the value of human connection better than the people who created it. That contradiction sits at the centre of Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi‘s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s acclaimed 2021 novel, a science-fiction fable that explores artificial intelligence, faith, grief and the lengths…
History has a funny way of remembering partnerships as individual achievements. Ask who first reached the summit of Mount Everest and Edmund Hillary’s name will likely arrive before Tenzing Norgay’s, despite the two men standing together atop the world’s highest mountain on May 29th, 1953. Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing seeks to redress that imbalance, shifting the…
The video game-to-film adaptation has long been a notoriously difficult undertaking. Despite the Mortal Kombat films enjoying relative commercial success and this year’s Resident Evil proving a welcome exception to the rule, Hollywood has continually struggled to translate the appeal of interactive entertainment into something equally engaging on the big screen. Whether it’s the baffling…
Jane Austen‘s stories have endured for more than two centuries, their romantic misunderstandings, rigid social expectations and quietly devastating heartbreaks proving remarkably timeless. It’s little wonder filmmakers continue to revisit her work, even when the challenge of bringing something new to such familiar material becomes increasingly difficult. With Sense and Sensibility, director Georgia Oakley isn’t…
At 155 minutes, and unfolding across three timelines that initially appear to have only the faintest connective tissue, La Bola Negra asks its audience to place an enormous amount of trust in directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. For much of its first two hours, their sweeping queer epic can feel deliberately elusive, moving between…
The notion of “moving on” after losing someone has always felt somewhat cruel. It suggests that grief is something we can eventually put behind us, that heartbreak comes with an expiration date, and that finding happiness again somehow requires us to leave behind the people who once made us happy. Cinema has often embraced this…
There is something inherently unsettling about the idea that the person you trust most in the world could be replaced by something altogether more sinister. It’s a simple but effective premise, one that has fuelled countless horror stories built around identity, parental protection and the terrifying uncertainty of childhood. In Other Mommy, director Rob Savage…
Given how dramatically our relationship with social media has mutated over the last two decades, it was perhaps inevitable that Aaron Sorkin would eventually return his attention to Facebook. This time, though, the creation of the platform is far less interesting than the monster it potentially became. Written and directed by Sorkin, The Social Reckoning…
Nickels is the type of film that could have very easily overwhelmed itself. A story about grief, possible reincarnation and the signs we attach meaning to could have exploded into melodrama or lengthy monologues about faith. Instead, director Spencer King approaches the material with admirable restraint, allowing uncertainty to hang over the film and trusting…
Colleen Hoover may not exactly be considered one of the great literary voices of our time, but there’s an amusing moment in Verity when struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) describes the titular author’s output as the type of books you pick up at the airport. It’s a knowingly cheeky assessment of Hoover’s own particular…
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has never been particularly interested in making films that quietly disappear into the background, and Digger may be one of his boldest swings yet. An absurdist, visually audacious satire about power, ego, environmental catastrophe and the stories people construct around themselves, it is the type of ambitious studio filmmaking that deserves to…
Yeon Sang-ho has never needed monsters to expose the uglier parts of humanity. Even when working within horror, science fiction or apocalyptic spectacle, the filmmaker behind Train to Busan and Hellbound has remained fascinated by what people become when circumstances push them somewhere uncomfortable. Following Colony and The Ugly, Paradise Lost continues that fascination on…
Happiness is an easy concept to romanticise. We spend so much of our lives imagining the job, relationship or milestone that will finally make everything fall into place, only to discover that fulfilment rarely arrives as neatly as expected. That uncomfortable distance between the life we picture and the one we actually inhabit sits at…
Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime understands that the most disturbing thing about To Catch a Predator was never necessarily what happened when Chris Hansen stepped out from behind that curtain. It was how effortlessly something ostensibly created in the name of public safety became entertainment; how quickly justice could be packaged, promoted and sold to an audience…
Ken “The Mad Canadian” Carter may willingly strap himself into vehicles designed to leave the ground, but don’t call him a daredevil. For Carter, the distinction matters. What he does isn’t supposed to be reckless. It requires engineering, preparation and an almost irrational faith that every calculation will keep him alive. It’s that increasingly fragile…
Young love and all the amazing, traumatic things that come with such are explored in Charlie Harper, Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean‘s emotional, non-linear romance dramedy, anchored by the moving performances – and palpable chemistry – of its leads, Emilia Jones and Nick Robinson. Centering around the two halves of its titular coupling (so no,…
At 155 minutes, and unfolding across three timelines that initially appear to have only the faintest connective tissue, La Bola Negra asks its audience to place an enormous amount of trust in directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. For much of its first two hours, their sweeping queer epic can feel deliberately elusive, moving between…
Being encouraged to recognise your own brilliance can prove a cruel lesson when the person doing the encouraging preferred you when that brilliance remained safely beneath theirs. That uncomfortable contradiction sits at the centre of Niki Byrne’s The Julia Set, an academically minded coming-of-age drama that doesn’t rewrite the formula but finds enough intelligence and…
Jonathan Schey’s Everybody Wants to F*ck Me is the kind of film that seems determined to make you laugh before making you question exactly why you’re laughing. What begins as a filthy comedy about modern dating gradually mutates into something darker, stranger and considerably more uncomfortable. Taron Egerton plays Adam, a London gallery worker who…
There’s an agonising distinction between wanting to live and wanting to have lived. Elsinore, Simon Stone’s deeply affecting account of the final chapter in Scottish actor Ian Charleson’s life, understands that difference intimately. Faced with a body increasingly betraying him, Charleson isn’t simply fighting for more time. He wants the time he has left to…
Films centred around degenerative illness are often walking an unenviable tonal tightrope. Push too hard towards inspiration and the characters can become vessels for an uplifting message; lean too heavily into suffering and their lives become defined entirely by their diagnosis. Onwards and Sideways understands that living with Parkinson’s can be frightening, exhausting, frustrating and,…
At a certain point in a long-term relationship, “When are you having kids?” seems to stop being considered an intrusive question and instead becomes accepted small talk. Marriage apparently isn’t enough of a milestone. Happiness isn’t enough of an answer. There must be a next step, and for Annie and Aaron, the wonderfully lived-in couple…
Rebel Wilson clearly has an enormous amount of affection for the girl groups that soundtracked her formative years. Spice Girls, All Saints, Destiny’s Child and The Pussycat Dolls all hover over Girl Group, a bright, loud and relentlessly enthusiastic musical comedy that wants to bottle the particular euphoria of watching a group of women harmonise,…
Technology may have finally achieved what decades of law enforcement couldn’t: put expert pickpocket Harry Lehman out of business. Nobody carries cash anymore. Phones can be tracked. Credit cards can be cancelled before you’ve even made it to the next subway stop. For the wonderfully weathered criminal at the centre of Noah Segan’s The Only…
History has a funny way of remembering partnerships as individual achievements. Ask who first reached the summit of Mount Everest and Edmund Hillary’s name will likely arrive before Tenzing Norgay’s, despite the two men standing together atop the world’s highest mountain on May 29th, 1953. Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing seeks to redress that imbalance, shifting the…
