Film Reviews

When the Oscars nominations were announced at the end of last week while all the talk was about the relative exclusion of black actors and directors, the main ‘traditional’ story was the success for The Revenant.  With 12 nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director and both male Acting awards, it’s clear that this was the Academy’s most all-round favourite film of the year. But for me, The Revenant was more about what it tried to do than what it actually showed to the viewer.  — Read more →

Trailers are often used to great effect in creating buzz about a movie, and of shaping your expectations of what you are going to get if you venture out to the cinema to catch the film.  But sometimes the trailers don’t capture the true feeling of the film, and leave you a little bemused afterwards.  Sadly, Foxcatcher is a great example where the film doesn’t quite live up to the trailer’s hype. Foxcatcher is about the true story of wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), and — Read more →

Some movies add up to more than the sum of their parts, with good all-round qualities that come together in such a way to make a film that’s not just good, but great.  Christopher Nolan’s latest film, the space epic Interstellar is one of them. Although the premise of the film’s action is from the realm of science-fiction, the story itself is an intensely human one.  Earth has become a more hostile place to live, with crops dying and food a scarce resource.  Former fighter — Read more →

Some films just make you feel creeped out the whole way through, and they don’t even need to be traditionally scary in a horror sense to do that, and Nightcrawler is one of those movies. Nightcrawler tells the story of Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a social pariah with a very deranged detachment from normal human emotions who gets involved in the ethically questionable ambulance-chasing news coverage that is popular in the Los Angeles of the day.  It’s a constantly escalating tale where the stories become — Read more →

World War II is still one of the most iconic eras in history in which to set films, even though the market is saturated with a wide range of fantastic movies looking at the different elements of the conflict.  There is something about the drama and the importance of the time, the real evil of the Nazis and the human emotion of war that really lends itself to compelling films. One of my favourites is Saving Private Ryan, one of Spielberg’s finest flicks, which follows — Read more →