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Michael Keaton at 75: The Essential Films
Marking Michael Keaton at 75: a look back across Michael's career through the films I've reviewed.
Ross McLaren
Rating: 4.0★
Blue Valentine (2010)
There is a moment in Blue Valentine where Ryan Gosling's character stands outside a shop front strumming something ridiculous on a ukulele while Michelle Williams dances along, and it stopped me cold. Not because it is showy or scored to make you feel a particular way, but because
Rating: 1.5★
Return to Silent Hill (2026)
There is a special circle of cinema reserved for the truly botched video-game adaptation, and its patron saint is Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the immortal catastrophe of House of the Dead, still one of the worst films I have ever sat through. I bring him up
2020s
Leave Me Alone (2025)
I came to Leave Me Alone partly for its lead. Kiran Sonia Sawar was wonderful in the miniseries Pure, a show I loved, and the chance to watch her carry a horror short was reason enough to say yes when the film-maker Shehroze Khan asked me to take a
Rating: 4.0★
Persepolis (2007)
I have found myself falling hard for Iranian cinema of late. Alongside the Japanese and the Korean, it has become one of the national traditions I most look forward to exploring, and the films keep rewarding the attention. So many of them are built around revolution, or quiet defiance, or
Rating: 2.5★
A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough (2026)
There's a moment early in A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough that stops you cold. The archive footage of a young Attenborough, sitting amongst mountain gorillas in the Rwandan Virungas in the 1970s, a juvenile called Pablo clambering over him with the casual confidence of someone who
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Jeff Tremaine at 60: The Essential Films
Marking Jeff Tremaine at 60: a look back across Jeff's career through the films I've reviewed.
Rating: 3.0★
Real Women Have Curves (2002)
The main reason to seek out Real Women Have Curves right now is to watch a future star at the very beginning. This was America Ferrera's first feature film, more than two decades before her showstopping monologue in Barbie reminded the world just how good she is, and
Rating: 3.0★
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)
You cannot watch Anvil! The Story of Anvil without This Is Spinal Tap playing somewhere in the back of your mind. I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment or a cheap joke. It's just that the parallels are so striking, so eerie, that you'
Rating: 3.0★
Born in Flames (1983)
There is a lovely irony sitting at the heart of Born in Flames, and it is this: made in 1983 and set in a near-future America, it now works best as a time capsule of the very moment it was made. Lizzie Borden's guerrilla-shot feminist drama
Rating: 2.5★
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Let me brace for the pitchforks. The Passion of Joan of Arc routinely turns up near the very summit of the "greatest films ever made" lists, spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, and having finally sat down with it I find myself genuinely baffled by the fervour. This
Rating: 2.5★
Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll (2019)
There is a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with a film being bad, and everything to do with realising, somewhere around the halfway point, that you have walked into the middle of someone else's conversation. That is more or less where I found myself