With Tar, his first feature length film as director since 2006’s Little Children, Todd Field mixes high fibre Ingmar Bergmanesque intellectualism with Michael Haneke’s growing sense of threat and some of the meticulous framing and clinical creepiness of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a very impressive but difficult combination requiring patience and work from the audience as they have to negotiate some
Read moreExactly what writer/ director Damien Chazelle was trying to say with his latest film, Babylon, a wild sprawling, occasionally funny, often ridiculous, exhaustingly manic, yet emotionally hollow homage/satire/savaging of early Hollywood is not entirely clear. It’s as if he’s poured all his memories of film making and watching into a blender, mixed them with lurid fantasies of Hollywood’s debauched underbelly
Read moreThe Fabelmans, the latest film from Steven Spielberg, is a semi fictionalised account of the director’s early life. That’s in no way apparent from the title which sounds more like the name of a 1950’s family sitcom. That title, however, not only reminds us that this is not a straight biopic but it’s largely about family and the values the
Read moreThe Banshees Of Inisherin, the latest film from In Bruges and Three Billboards writer/director Martin McDonagh, is a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, very quirky, if slightly uneven tragi-comedy that sits somewhere between folk tale, shaggy dog story and revenge fable. The leads from In Bruges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, play two locals, Padraic and Colm, living on the fictional
Read moreAfter a mere 13 years comes the first of apparently many sequels to James Cameron’s Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time. I had mixed feelings about the 2009 original which depicted the giant blue alien Na’vi people’s battle to preserve their home world of Pandora from greedy, destructive earth forces. While its central science fiction concept of people’s
Read moreWhile it doesn’t always hit the mark, in its best moments the jet-black culinary comedy The Menu cleverly (and violently) skewers foodie pretention, the cult of celebrity chefs, the loss of artistic credibility and America’s unspoken class system. There are familiar flavours here with dashes of Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Haneke, disturbing dinner party dramas like Luis Bunuel’s The
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