Andrew Haigh’s third feature follows his second, Weekend (2011) in depicting an intimate portrait of two people in a relationship. In Weekend, that relationship was just beginning; here, it’s deep – forty-five years deep. That’s the anniversary looming at the end of the week for Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtney) and Kate’s planning a big party with…
Carol is the latest successful adaptation of the incredibly cinema-friendly fiction of Patricia Highsmith, although here her source novel, The Price of Salt, is semi-autobiography. The material has found a perfect executor in director Todd Haynes, who combines his exquisite sense of period with a very personal subversive streak, and actors Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who both…
Romantic, moving, embracing and thoroughly old-fashioned, Brooklyn is a gorgeous film centred by a major performance by Saoirse Ronan, who is making no mistakes in fulfilling the promise she showed when she received her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, for Atonement, in 2007, when she was thirteen years old. Now she’s nominated for Best Actress for Brooklyn, and, were…
Brie Larson won the Golden Globe for her lead performance in Room, an audacious and inspiring film, a coherent, complex and confident blend of arthouse experimentalism, mainstream thriller and serious drama. It’s one of the best films, easily, of this “Awards Season”. Larson and Jacob Tremblay play a mother and her son living in extreme…
Concussion is a well-made film that might be the final straw, or the first bell, to get many Football fans to wake up to the reality that 22 people slamming into each other every 25 seconds for 60 minutes is a perfect plan to destroy the human brain. The film shows Will Smith playing Dr.…
Quentin Tarantino’s eighth feature film is his sixth best. I know this is cool by him because when I interviewed him (link below) he asked me whether I had a favorite film of his, when I told him I had a list he asked to hear it, and when I read it out he proclaimed…
Anomalisa is the new film written by Charlie Kaufman (based on a staged radio play he wrote) and directed by both Kaufman and Duke Johnson, (of Morel Orel fame). It’s derfinitely unique, and maybe not for everyone. It is, however, for me. I think Anomalisa is quite a fascinating and wonderful film, and indeed, an…
So, after seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens a couple more times, I managed to see The Revenant. Director Alejandro Inarrito is clearly on fire right now – and earning every ounce of “director to watch” when his first feature film Amores Perros came out. Then 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, and Birdman or (The Unexpected…
Ladies and gentlemen, a film franchise has been saved. And perhaps more importantly, some of our childhoods. Even with all the hype and the trepidation and the expectations, this new chapter in the Star Wars saga, The Force Awakens, is a return to the tone and feel of the Original Three, most especially Star Wars,…
J.J. Abrams’ homage to the first Star Wars film – the one that took our collective breath away, the one that defined our childhoods – takes “fan service” to new heights, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Charting a very similar course – plot-wise, character-wise, milieu-wise – as the 1977 film (aka A New Hope), it will be…