Category: Review
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Live By Night
Ben Affleck is a good Boston boy now isn’t he? There should be a statue of him if there isn’t already, probably in some kind of suit. Imagine by one of those big Boston landmarks, a big old grumpy faced Affleck. Or maybe there should be three: young, hot Ben; older, doughy (but still hot)…
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Collateral Beauty
Collateral Beauty is the year’s best comedy so far. Even when it’s not trying to be. Especially when it’s not trying to be. It’s not inept, it’s just that every aspect of the premise that it is built upon is so comically misjudged that when Will Smith is trying to be all weepy about his…
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La La Land
There’s not really much point in approaching a review after everything has been said. Especially when it’s been being said for a month and, in addition to having nothing new to add, its being said in a review that is unlikely to get one crucified and even more unlikely to be read. Enough of this,…
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Zero Days
But to think, in 2012 Alex Gibney released his WikiLeaks film. It’s a good one. The one with the subtitle We Steal Secrets. Woof. That’s probably going to look more like a cruel joke upon rewatching sometime soon. It’s telling the end of a story, quite a satisfying one at that. Now Assange is back…
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Endless Poetry
Is self-portraiture necessarily onanism? Society kinda looks down of self-involvement: look at public reaction to, well, any artist that’s work concerns themselves. The urge to capture ourself in our work is too great I guess. Like, Van Gogh did something like 20 and he died at 37. Artists bring their individual styles, liven up the…
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Assassin’s Creed
In 2007 the developers of Assassin’s Creed (2007) cursed themselves. The legacy of the entire series can be tracked in its attempts to escape the ramifications of a choice that probably made sense at the time. We, nine years later now, sit in a theatre watching Ubisoft’s first film, one they’re wanting to be sure is…
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Silence
It’s hard for films to be about torture without fetishising it. Point, we call films torture porn because, fuck, ain’t humanity appealing enough without jamming those two words together. This becomes harder when you jam faith into the mix because cinematic discourses of violence without bringing morality into the mix. Martin Scorsese jumps into this…
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Why Him?
It takes a certain kind of bullishness to program your Christmas film through January. Even worse when, for the most part it’s set in sunny, sunny LA. I imagine it came out last week when I wasn’t paying attention but, in January, Christmas feels as further off then ever. Then you hear a festive jingle…
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A Monster Calls
Whether or not this film is going to work on you or not depends on your reaction to one moment. That in which the monster calls. Beacuse the first time it does so, it’s rough. Like real rough. The film packs a lot into it’s first fifteen minutes, it deftly creates a world, fleshes out…
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A United Kingdom
I don’t usually notice technical editing in a film. I know technicals are the wrong word for this, there’s artistry to be found in colour and compositing and audio mixing. But for want of a better term, we’ll stick with that. A United Kingdom has some of the most distracting choices in the regard I’ve…
A Grand Quiet 