Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue and made Swiss Cottage, say. On the other hand, maybe you did have it coming, especially as I once overheard one mother say to another in the Coffee Cup: ‘James? He had so much homework
The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as well, because it plays for about half the 98 minutes, while a superannuated Churchill, played by Brian Cox, moons about on beaches, deeply penitent for his catastrophic authorisation of the Gallipoli disaster in which a
My Cousin Rachel is an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s mystery-romance and, even though it stars the forever wonderful Rachel Weisz, it’s more sedate than suspenseful, more tasteful than dangerous. This should be a creepy, gripping tale of paranoia, deception, lust, and suspicions that are founded, unfounded, founded, then unfounded again. (There is a great
Oh, Pirates of the Caribbean, I have given you every chance down the years. Every chance. I am always hopeful. This may be the one that has a proper story I can follow, I have told myself. This may be the one in which Johnny Depp even bothers to act, I have told myself. This
We love Amy Schumer. Fact. And we love Goldie Hawn. Fact. But can we love Snatched? Not so much, if at all. Perhaps the addition of ‘if at all’ is unnecessary, and rather mean. But it’s done now. There are a couple of decent jokes, it’s true, but they are 1) all in the trailer
There are bigger entities landing at your local multiplex this week. An ancient indestructible franchise is re-re-(re-)booted in Alien: Covenant. In Jawbone, it’s seconds out for yet another boxing movie. Miss Sloane is that non-staple of the repertoire, a glossy feminist thriller about public relations. Something there for almost everyone. But there’s also a low-budget
Two 16-year-old schoolgirls from a sink estate in Bradford find fun and happiness by shacking up with a middle-aged married man — if you’ve never seen it, it sounds like the worst movie ever made. Yet Rita, Sue and Bob Too was a delight, one of the best British films of the 1980s, and this
Lady Macbeth, which has nothing to do with boring old Shakespeare beyond indicating a certain archetype (huge sighs of relief all round), is a British period drama about a young woman who, trapped in a cold, loveless marriage, finds sexual passion elsewhere, and runs with it. And runs with it. And runs with it. And
Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty’s first film appearance in 15 years and his first as writer, director, producer and star since Bulworth, 19 years ago. Plenty of time, then, to figure out what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it, but Rules is entirely baffling. Is it a tale of
The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we love Jim Broadbent), Harriet Walter (we love Harriet Walter) and Charlotte Rampling (we love, love, love Charlotte Rampling). With such a cast, you’d be minded to think it can’t fail, and it doesn’t in this
Films can be poetry — or like poetry; or poetic, at least — but can poetry ever be film? That is our question for today, and I’ll attempt to answer it, although there is absolutely no saying that I’ll be able to do so. Always touch and go, that. A Quiet Passion is Terence Davies’s
Ghost in the Shell is the Hollywood live-action remake of the 1995 Japanese anime of the same name and it’s set at a time in the future when, it would appear, the world is populated by blandly one-dimensional characters. Evil is perpetrated by our old friend, Corporate Evil Man — yes, still — and everyone
Two films for you this week, one of which is surprisingly good and one of which does not surprise in the least. Shall we be unsurprised first? OK, Another Mother’s Son, set during the second world war on Nazi-occupied Jersey, is based on the true story of Louisa Gould, who took in an escaped Russian
To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay
Elle has been described as ‘a rape revenge comedy’, which seems unlikely, and also as ‘post-feminist’, which is likely as, in my experience, that simply means anything goes so long as you acknowledge that feminism has happened. The film stars Isabelle Huppert, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance, and who has repeatedly said that her
Gurinder Chadha’s modern comedies have fun with cultural divides. Girls kick footballs in Bend It Like Beckham. A gaggle of Punjabis hit Blackpool in Bhaji on the Beach. Jane Austen goes to Bollywood in Bride & Prejudice. In all these films (we may discount Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), Indians and Britons grapple with the
Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is one of those angst-ridden dramas focusing on what is commonly referred to as a ‘dysfunctional family’ as if there might be any other kind and it isn’t just a question of degree. This family certainly doesn’t hold back. This family has everyone shouting at everyone
Moonlight is, in fact, a traditional story about identity, and finding out who you are, but it has rarely been better told, or more achingly, or while navigating a subject that hasn’t come up much at the cinema, if at all. (Being black and gay.) True enough, it was La La Land that swept the
Unlike with buses, you wait ages and ages for one fabulous film as framed by the older female perspective to come along and then there’s absolutely no saying when the next one will be, or if there will ever be another. (Indeed, a recent study of 2,000 films found that women in the 42–65 age
‘All that glisters is not gold,’ wrote Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), and you have to hand it to the guy, as he’s nailed it on the head. This Gold certainly glisters. You look at the poster and think: ‘Oh, yes. Glistery.’ It’s directed by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed the terrific Syriana. It
