Author Jack Blackwell

In 2009, Israeli writer-director and former tank gunner Samuel Maoz blew away the competition at the Venice Film Festival with his searing, Golden Lion-winning debut, Lebanon. Eight years on, Maoz returns to...

Generally the first exposure to foreign film for a British child is in a French lesson towards the end of term. Over the last decade or so, 2004’s The Chorus and the 2008 Palme d’Or winner The...

S. Craig Zahler’s follow up to the hallucinatory Bone Tomahawk was always going to be something unique, but very little can prepare you for Brawl in Cell Block 99. By a wide margin the strangest thing at...

Full of wide, near-barren vistas and trying to fit three different films into one, Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete has all the hallmarks of a Brit director’s first foray to America. It gets lost in the...

Jane Fonda and Robert Redford already have previous experience working on Netflix projects, with Grace & Frankie and The Discovery respectively bringing these legendary faces to the small screen....

Mass migration is one of the biggest international crises of the last decade, with more people displaced now than at any point since the end of World War 2. As artist and activist Ai Weiwei's documentary...

A courtroom drama, a study of masculinity in crisis, and a treatise on the geopolitical state of modern Lebanon, Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult has tonnes of ambition, but lacks the focus and intensity needed...

Anticipation for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water has been sky high, thanks to its prestigious cast and a beautiful trailer. Amazingly, it completely surpasses these expectations to conjure up a...

"White guys go crazy in the South American jungle" is a well-worn genre at this point. From Werner Herzog’s one-two of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, to more modern spins Embrace of the Serpent and The Lost City...

Legendary director William Friedkin steps behind the camera for another exorcism – this time a purportedly real one that he gained exclusive access to the Vatican to film. It should be a knockout, but...

Alexander Payne kicks off the 2017 Venice Film Festival with a strange, ambitious, and often pummellingly downbeat story. After Norwegian scientists make the miraculous breakthrough of cellular miniaturisation...

Kathryn Bigelow’s return to cinemas couldn’t be more tragically timely. Just over a week after the horrifying Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the racism deep at the roots of the American psyche has been...

Randomly select any episode from Seasons 3 through 8 of The Simpsons and you’ll most likely be greeted with one of the best episodes of TV comedy you could ever hope to see. Randomly select any episode from...

It hardly needs be said that World War II has been a cinematic goldmine pretty much since it started. A terrifyingly huge and barbarically violent industrial conflict on a scale never seen before or since, it...

In the space of three short years, Ridley Scott redefined sci-fi cinema twice with Alien and Blade Runner. In the nearly 40 years since, countless films from a range of genres have owed enormous debts to these...