Rating: 1.5★
I went into Pontypool primed to love it. The cult reputation had been ringing in my ears for a while, that whispered promise of a clever, low-budget sleeper that does something genuinely different with the horror genre. And the premise, I'll admit, is still one I cannot
Rating: 2.5★
For just over seventy minutes, a calm, unhurried voice recites the tangled affairs of Germany's post-war industrial dynasties: the bankruptcies, the frauds, the convenient deaths, the dynastic feuds. Over the top of it runs a stream of images that, as far as I could ever tell, has
Rating: 3.5★
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in
Rating: 1.0★
Every so often a film comes along so brazen in its theft that you almost admire the nerve. Mac and Me is one of them: an E.T. knockoff so shameless it makes you wonder how it was ever allowed to reach a cinema. Stewart Raffill's 1988 "
2020s
Mon Taxi did something I do not often let short films do to me. It moved me. I will be honest here, the experimental, avant-garde documentary short is usually a form I admire more than I actually enjoy, all mood and montage with not much to hold onto. Meriem
Country Luxembourg
Child is a film I admired and argued with in almost equal measure. For a good long stretch it is a lean, harrowing moral drama, and then it takes a hard turn into somewhere far stranger, and I came away genuinely torn about whether that swerve was brave or a
Rating: 2.0★
Work through enough of Jackie Chan's vast filmography, as I have been steadily doing, and you start to notice two careers running side by side: the astonishing Hong Kong run that built his name, and the patchier Western-facing vehicles that followed once Hollywood came calling. The Medallion
Rating: 3.0★
Here is your quick test for whether Police Academy is going to work for you: Michael Winslow opens his mouth and out comes a full arsenal of gunfire, sirens, squealing tyres and revving engines, entirely from his own vocal cords, without a sound effect in sight. If that makes you
Rating: 3.5★
Ask me to picture James Bond, and, sacrilege though it surely is with Connery and Moore both in the room, I don't reach for either of them. I see Pierce Brosnan, tuxedo immaculate, Walther in hand, in GoldenEye. That image is lodged somewhere deep, and after rewatching it
Rating: 3.5★
By 2006, the Bond franchise had well and truly lost the plot. The Brosnan years had drifted into self-parody, and Die Another Day, with its invisible car and that excruciating CGI surfing sequence, was the nadir of a series that had stopped taking itself seriously some time before that.
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like a piece of evidence, and Kikuyu Land is one of them. Directed by the Emmy winning Andrew H. Brown and the Kenyan journalist and film-maker Bea Wangondu, it is one of the most
Rating: 3.5★
Some films you find for yourself. This one was handed to me, in a school history class, and it is one of the rare occasions I can say the curriculum did me a favour. Peter Medak's drama tells the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man with
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