Bao: Per the norm Incredibles 2 opens with a short film, this one entitled Bao. A beautiful little piece concerning an Asian woman who one day cooks up some dumplings for her distant husband. To her shock one of these dumplings gains sentience and so begins a lovely mother/son montage that any parent in the…

Pulling off a big dumb movie is surprisingly hard. It requires a confidence in tone, an internal logic no matter how silly the concept and leading stars committed to their material. Dwayne Johnson has sort of made a career out of big silly movies. High concepts, low brains, big hearts and of course little in…

The year is 2028. Los Angeles is in the midst of city wide riots due to the rationing of water. The police have issued a curfew. Taking advantage of the situation two brothers attempt to rob a bank, one gets shot. They take refuge in the Hotel Artemis. Run by Nurse Thomas (Jodie Foster), a…

Flip through any book about popular music and you’ll find dozens of musicians’ stories with tragic heartbreaking ends. Tales of intimate beginnings, soaring highs and ignoble lows, inter-meshed with drugs, sex and damn fine music. No wonder so many documentarians seek out these figures as centrepieces for their works. In the last few years alone…

Sicario is not a film you would’ve expected to gain a sequel. Sure there is mileage in its tale of murky border policies between Mexico and the US, and the lengths to which both sides will go to reach their goal. Yet Denis Villeneuve, possibly one of the greatest filmmakers working today, elevated the first…

There are some films that no matter how much I enjoy them I inevitably struggle in how to write a review on it. A more experienced critic would find no issue but alas this fledgling ‘critic’ has been beaten on more than one occasion, and so it goes again with Ocean’s Eight. An all female…

Apologies for the lack of posts recently but quite frankly there has been absolutely nothing going on film-wise in the last few weeks. Thanks in no small part to the arrival of the World Cup, which causes studios to delay their films here in the U.K for at least a month. But never fear things…

In 2015 two of the most popular franchises returned after many years of absence, and in an odd way both had very similar temperaments. Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens each springboarded their new stories off a deep-rooted nostalgia, repeating plot beats and even structure to gift fans with pretty much exactly what…

We open to the nerve jangling sound of discordant strings, immediately sensing that something is not right. After a brief newspaper obituary appears on screen, its everyday nature coupled with the foreboding music helping to offset even more, we cut to what looks to be a dolls house. As the camera moves ever closer to…

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a good film. Now that may not sound like the most ringing of endorsements, but you have to take into account just what this production has gone through in order to reach our screens. Pressure was already on the film from the moment of announcement, notably from the fan…