Rating: 2.5★
There is something almost quaint about the fact that Bright arrived in December 2017 with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for a major studio tent-pole release, yet landed quietly on Netflix with no theatrical run to speak of. That was still a relatively novel distribution model for a
Rating: 2.5★
By 2009, Michael Bay had already established himself as Hollywood's most reliable purveyor of organised chaos, a filmmaker whose work divides audiences as reliably as his editing divides scenes. After the enormous commercial success of Transformers (2007), a sequel was never in doubt. What followed was a production
Rating: 2.5★
There is something genuinely bittersweet about the video rental shop as a cultural relic. For anyone who grew up in Britain or Ireland during the 1980s and early 1990s, the local video store was a kind of temple, its back shelves lined with lurid VHS covers promising monsters, mayhem, and
Rating: 2.5★
There is a long and restless tradition in world cinema of using the horror genre as a vessel for social and political anxieties, particularly around bodies, identity, and the pressures of conformity. From the body-horror provocations of Cronenberg through to the folk-inflected dread of more recent European and
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 2.5★
Soca music and the streets of Port of Spain make for a vivid backdrop, but She Paradise (2020) is less interested in tourism than in the particular pressures facing a young woman trying to carve out a life on her own terms. The film arrives as part of a modest
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain franchises that define a particular moment in Hollywood history, and the Transformers series is a fairly clear example of what blockbuster filmmaking looked like in the mid-2000s. The property itself began life as a line of Hasbro toys in the early 1980s, quickly followed by a
Rating: 2.5★
Ingmar Bergman made Winter Light in 1963 as the second film in what critics and scholars have come to call his "silence of God" trilogy, sandwiched between Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963). The trilogy emerged from a period of intense personal and artistic reckoning
Rating: 2.5★
Argentine horror has a quietly distinguished track record, even if English-speaking audiences have tended to encounter it only in fragments, a festival buzz title here, a streaming recommendation there. Films like Monos demonstrated that Latin American genre cinema can operate on its own terms, with its own rhythms and
Rating: 2.5★
Twenty-two years after a modestly budgeted street-racing thriller about stolen DVD players became an unexpected box-office phenomenon, the Fast and Furious franchise has grown into one of Hollywood's most reliably profitable properties, and one of its most cheerfully ridiculous. What began as a point-to-
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Bresson occupies a singular position in the French cinema canon, a director so committed to his own aesthetic principles that his films feel less like conventional narratives and more like philosophical arguments made in moving images. By the time Pickpocket arrived in 1959, Bresson had already established himself as
Rating: 2.5★
By the time Furious 7 arrived in cinemas in April 2015, the franchise that began with a modest street-racing film set in Los Angeles had become one of the biggest commercial properties on the planet. What The Fast and the Furious (2001) started as a fairly contained, if enjoyably
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