Rating: 2.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Walt Disney Feature Animation found itself at a crossroads it had been approaching for some years. The so-called Disney Renaissance of the late eighties and nineties, that remarkable run from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had produced a string of films that
Rating: 2.5★
By 1925, Buster Keaton had already established himself as one of the two great pillars of silent comedy, the stone-faced counterpoint to Chaplin's sentimentality. Working through his own independent production company, Keaton enjoyed a creative freedom that few filmmakers of the era could claim, and the run
Rating: 3.5★
There is a category of film, if you can even call it that, which exists somewhere between genuine art and high-end corporate entertainment. The Audition, released in 2015 and running to a modest sixteen minutes, sits squarely in that peculiar territory. The project was commissioned by Melco-Crown Entertainment,
Rating: 2.5★
Hunter S. Thompson spent the better part of four decades trying to get The Rum Diary published. He wrote the novel in the early 1960s, drawing on his time as a young freelance journalist in Puerto Rico, but the manuscript sat in a drawer until Johnny Depp, a close friend
Rating: 3.0★
The Muppets have a cultural footprint that is genuinely difficult to overstate. Jim Henson's original creations first found their audience on American television in the mid-1970s, before crossing the Atlantic and becoming a firm fixture in British living rooms too. By the time the theatrical films arrived,
Rating: 3.5★
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts strip had been running in American newspapers since 1950, and by the late 1960s it had already made a successful leap to television via the beloved specials produced by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It'
Rating: 3.5★
Tonga is a small island kingdom in the South Pacific, one of the few nations in the world never formally colonised by a European power, and it carries that distinction with considerable pride. It also carries a strong tradition of Christian observance, with churches representing a remarkable range of denominations
Rating: 3.0★
Glauber Rocha is one of those directors whose reputation in film studies circles far outstrips his name recognition among general audiences, and The Lion Has Seven Heads (original title: Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, a title that itself announces the film's polyglot, deliberately fractured identity) is a reasonable
Rating: 4.5★
There are films that arrive and are enjoyed, and there are films that arrive and rearrange the furniture permanently. Neo Tokyo gave a hint of what Japanese animation was quietly building towards, but it was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira in 1988 that brought the whole argument to a head.
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a notoriously bumpy road to the big screen, but the Mortal Kombat franchise has always occupied a slightly different corner of that conversation. The original 1995 film is, for a certain generation, a genuinely beloved piece of nineties nonsense, and when Simon McQuoid's
Rating: 3.5★
There are corners of twentieth-century history that cinema has barely touched, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor is one of them. From 1975 to 1999, the territory endured what international tribunals have since described as a campaign of systematic violence, famine, and cultural suppression that killed a significant
Rating: 4.0★
There are certain sporting figures from the 1990s who lodge themselves in the cultural memory not just because of what they achieved, but because of how they achieved it. Prince Naseem Hamed was one of those figures. The Sheffield-born featherweight, son of Yemeni immigrants, rose from the steel city&
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