These past few weeks, the films I’ve looked at have had a rather ‘cult’ feel to them. First there was Little Shop of Horrors which boasts the kind of camp cult features, A Fish Called Wanda provided us with irreverent cult comedy, and now there’s Withnail & I, which is… a lot more difficult to categorise. It’s a…
There are very few things in this life that I hate. Inequality, violence, and talking in the cinemas rank highly in the very short list, but sitting atop the list, like an eviction notice written on a pile of cow dung on the welcome mat of my life, is Titanic. Now, I get that this…
I have been surprised by many films. Surprised by how good, bad, or indifferent they are. I’ve sat through some utter dross, and some utter gems. But I have never been so surprised to fall in love with a film as much as I fell in love with The Godfather. That’s not to say I…
Sometimes it’s really hard to write something funny about a film. In some cases it can be so inconsequential that it’s hard to think of anything interesting to say about it, and in some cases, especially this one, it’s just a matter of tone. I hadn’t seen Schindler’s List until quite recently, when it was…
After Parasite last month, I find myself feeling more open than ever towards foreign films. I had initially been dismissive of films from a different culture, purely from a language perspective; oftentimes a language is far too complex to translate directly to English, but once I mentally got over that hurdle in my own mind,…
Mark Ruffalo has form for political thrillers. A few years ago, he starred in the brilliant Spotlight a film about a group of journalists who uncovered the extent of child abuse within the Catholic Church in America, which won Best Picture at the Oscars. Now he’s uncovering a whole new mystery, although he’s changed jobs from journalists…
There are films that come along in cinemas each year which will look similar to something else, maybe a plot resembles one from a film ten years previously, or a certain actor is playing a similar character. I get this kind of feeling a lot when it comes to a certain stable of British films.…
Myself and period dramas have had a, shall we say, ‘turbulent’ relationship. I’ve liked some, when they try something new or different with the formula, see Little Women or The Personal History of David Copperfield for examples of such, but mostly I find them to be dull, routine, and overproduced. If I ever need an example for this opinion,…
Every so often a film comes along that reminds you why you love cinema. Three Billboards a few years ago was one such film, as was Dunkirk, and now it has a stablemate: Parasite. The current importance of this film cannot be overstated. The first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture at the…
There are times when a film comes along, and I’m utterly baffled by it. I can be baffled by the fact that someone greenlit such a film, or baffled it took so long to do that, because the result was so great. Then there are films that generally leave me in a haze of uncertainty,…
