Gifted is an unashamed tear-jerker but a surprisingly effective one. It falls into the vulnerable kid genius sub-genre along with films like Little Man Tate although, refreshingly, the wunderkind here is a little girl. Mary (McKenna Grace) is a seven-year-old orphan who has lived with her mechanic uncle Frank (Captain America’s Chris Evans) since her mathematician mother’s death. Home-schooled for
Read moreSofia Coppola’s films are rarely plot driven, instead they focus on relationships, manners, gestures and as in The Bling Ring and The Virgin Suicides, female sub-cultures. Coppola’s remake of the 1970 Clint Eastwood film The Beguiled exemplifies these themes. Set in the deep south during the American Civil War as the confederate campaign began to collapse, the film sees wounded
Read moreLike a slightly less grim Michael Haneke film, Romanian drama Graduation is a story of moral crisis told in a raw and understated manner. The film centres around 50-something surgeon Romeo (Adrian Titieni) who, despite his prestigious career, lives in a grim-looking housing estate in Transylvania with his wife Magda (Lia Bugnar) – from whom he sleeps separately – and
Read moreThe film Churchill often feels as if director Johnathon Teplitzky and writer Alex von Tunzelmann have taken The King’s Speech and replaced King George the Sixth with Winston Churchill. Both films are about a British leader confronting self-doubt and the crushing responsibility to their people in the dark days of the Second World War. Churchill is not a comprehensive biopic
Read more1979 was a tumultuous year particularly in the US where the Iran hostage saga, an energy crises and economic and social fragmentation severely dented the nation’s sense of supremacy and led to serious lack of confidence in the political system and the values that had driven the nation since its founding; something upon which Ronald Reagan and corporate America later
Read moreA strange mash-up of M Night Shyamalan’s better work and Meet the Parents, the socially perceptive, comedy-inflected horror film Get Out is an impressive directorial debut for Jordan Peel. Here, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is the boyfriend nervously heading to a first encounter with his girlfriend’s parents. He’s particularly anxious because his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) hasn’t mentioned to
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