Author Calum Baker

Another decade, another dollar – billions and billions of dollars, that is, spent on both making and watching films. Early 2010 saw Avatar clamber to the first-ever $2 billion gross, becoming the biggest...

The Farewell, written and directed by Lulu Wang, is fast being slotted into one of film culture’s more interesting reductive categories: the heartfelt indie that makes everyone cry. The very premise primes...

You're already up to date, I'm sure. Mostly because, even if you weren't up to date, everything's gone back to normal anyway so it doesn't matter. Recap: After warning last year that the 91st Academy...

NBA agency drama High Flying Bird is talky – fast-talky. It was written by a man trained as a playwright, and it details the back-end business side of a major corporatised sport. Even if you already know...

10 years ago, Bradley Cooper may as well have been nobody. Then he starred in The Hangover. Then... uh... The Hangover 2. But six brief years since his "serious film" breakout Silver Linings Playbook, the...

Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 film Marwencol should be far more available than it is. The DVD is strangely hard to come by, at least in the UK, while digital copies can be rented or purchased from iTunes, but not...

The long shadow cast by Paul Schrader has given us the best, and the most dreary and insulting, of modern cinema. As a writer, his neuroses combined with his deep understanding of film noir helped create a...

By the end of Mary Poppins, it's easy to mistake its warmth for simplicity. As moving as it is, it's basic as all hell: two hours and 20 minutes just build up to George Banks learning a lesson and embracing...

I can't believe I'm writing this, but the most critically acclaimed film of the year was just, like, dropped last weekend. On Netflix. Alfonso Cuarón's long-gestating followup to Gravity has absolutely...

After leaving The Crimes of Grindelwald, the tenth film in the Wizarding World cine-verse, your appreciation for J.K. Rowling may reach its lowest point yet. Oh, sure, Fantastic Beasts part one was delightful,...

Any conversation about the director Steve McQueen will involve his long shots. It’s impossible to think of Hunger without remembering Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham just chatting for 17 minutes, in...

You've no doubt heard the old Italian joke (well, the joke quoted in Watchmen at least) about the depressed man who, passing through a small town, decides enough is enough and he needs help. "Dottore," he...

We’ve all been there: standing around, minding your own business, something completely innocuous happens nearby and you’re thrown down the mental rabbit-hole. In Christine Hooper’s colourful...

Land of Mine is a war film, but only circuitously. WWII is over, and instead of combat we follow Denmark’s German PoWs rinsing their army’s sins: removing innumerable landmines from the Danish coast. From...

The opening minutes of City of Ghosts show Matthew Heineman on the same showy form that made his Cartel Land so interesting. Key members of Syrian anti-ISIS journalist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently...