Director Andrew Haigh’s wonderful 2017 film, Lean on Pete, which told the story of a young guy (Charlie Plummer) travelling across the American West with a horse he had saved from the slaughterhouse was one of the most affecting films of recent times. Haigh’s latest film, the very moving, intimate, slow burn, All Of Us Strangers similarly draws us into
Read moreWith his perceptive and articulate dramas like Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska, director Alexander Payne was establishing himself as one of the major film auteurs of the new millennium. His stellar reputation as a filmmaker was tarnished somewhat, though, with the 2017 sci fi themed social satire Downsizing which featured on some critics’ turkey lists. Now, he makes a welcome
Read moreThe Colour Purple is the cinema adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of the 1985 Steven Spielberg film adaptation of the 1892 Alice Walker novel. This time, Blitz Bazawule rather than Spielberg directs although Spielberg and Quincy Jones return as producers alongside the stage musical’s producers Scott Sanders and Oprah Winfrey. The stage to screen adaptation can be a tricky
Read moreLook out Generations Y and Z, your cool cultural icons are now becoming retro nostalgia. The latest acquisition is high school clique comedy Mean Girls which was originally filmed in 2004 and propelled Lindsay Lohan to stardom. Like the Colour Purple, Mean Girls was turned into a stage musical that has itself been adapted into a film. The buoyant preview
Read moreLike David Lynch in the 1990s and 2000s, Yorgos Lanthimos has brought dark humour and surreal artistry at least a little closer to mainstream cinema. He’s skewered relationships and social conformity in The Lobster, elitist power structures in The Favourite and the suburban family in The Killing Of a Sacred Deer. Now, he turns his darkly comic gaze to sexism
Read moreWriter/director Kristoffer Borgli’s strange psychological drama, Dream Scenario joins Beau Is Afraid, Poor Things, Babylon and various others in the impressive roster of inventively odd recent films. In one of his career best performances, Nicolas Cage stars as evolutionary biology professor Paul Mathews, a seemingly ordinary chap who becomes the centre of a bizarre social phenomena. People begin reporting that
Read more