Author Calum Baker

Whitney: Can I Be Me sees Nick Broomfield take on the iconic spectre of Asif Kapadia's Amy, and largely fail. His brief, of course, is to take on the iconic spectre of Whitney Houston, but again, we've seen...

There is a great tradition in cinema of the normally "comic" actor going "serious"; even more of a risk, however, is when a full-time standup makes the transition to acting in the first place. It can be...

As Obama announces the upcoming withdrawal of troops, General Glen McMahon (Pitt) laments eight years wasted on a losing battle. You can sympathise; War Machine is only two hours, but almost every minute is...

If you haven't done so before, we'd recommend watching each of these brief shorts as you go through. The shortest is 2:32 and the longest is around eight minutes.  Writer-director Michaël Dudok de Wit...

Curiously, Jane Jacobs doesn't appear that often in Citizen Jane; the subtitle, Battle for the City, is far more appropriate. Director Matt Tyrnauer actually presents a study of urban development over the...

Last year's Cannes Film Festival was a real crowdpleaser in terms of headline names: Jim Jarmusch and Nicolas Winding Refn each blew us away, Jeff Nichols made a slow-burning stonker, and Asghar Farhadi...

Adaptations: they're never as good as the book. Lord of the Rings purists would mostly agree, and though Ang Lee and Emma Thompson did an Oscar-winning number on Sense and Sensibility, there's no way any of...

What a time to be alive. Bryan Cranston, 25 years and six Emmys after playing "Snizzard" in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, is returning to the franchise reboot as the all-new ultra-realistic Zordon. The...

We often hold up that brand of ultra-realism known as “verite” as a paragon of out-there, maverick filmmaking. The brilliance of Tanna’s essential project makes even the finest of verite pictures look...

Vignettes are nothing new in independent cinema. One of America's unsung treasures, Kelly Reichardt, recently made her own contribution to the subgenre with Certain Women, a film composed of three...

Here it is, folks: the night we spend all year preparing for. The nominations for the 89th Academy Awards represent a wonderful mix of styles, voices and perspectives, which is exactly what a good film awards...

It is difficult these days to associate Hollywood with pleasant surprises. Releases are so aggressively micromanaged and carefully marketed, pre-marketed, and teased out that even when a blockbuster you...

Danae Elon has a remarkably relatable habit of both admitting her own failings and failing to admit them. P.S. Jerusalem, narrated intermittently by its director-cinematographer, is a fascinating, frustrating...

The creation, and expansion, of McDonald’s in the 1950s is one of Western culture’s most important benchmarks. Its ramifications on the global economy have been staggering. The influence it continues to...

T2 Trainspotting is a gritty drama dealing with the harshness of middle-age in a left-behind society. Its characters must deal with past sins, including betrayal, aggravated assault, self-loathing and drug...