Author Jack Blackwell

It’s not often that you watch a two and a half hour film and think, ‘that could have been longer.’ Such is the power of Burning that it could last eight hours and it would still be compelling, a dark,...

Based on an unlikely and incredible true story, Museum is a film with a mountain of ideas and things to say that sometimes finds itself swamped by its own ambition. Following Juan (Gael García Bernal), a...

This review was originally published as part of our London Film Festival coverage on 18/10/2018 Just as Embrace of the Serpent grounded itself in indigenous stories, so too does Ciro Guerra’s followup...

Truth is a fickle concept at the best of times, but during a war sponsored by one of the world’s greatest purveyors of Fake News, the very notions of facts and rationality go flying out the window. This is...

A fair few films have used the narrative trick of blurring reality and fiction, but almost none of them have done it as confusingly and pointlessly as Touch Me Not. A perverse and neurotic study of intimacy,...

The Wild Pear Tree is not a film you can watch or recommend casually. Like all Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work, it’s enormously long, serious, and dense with dialogue, requiring over three hours of concentration...

An easy way to raise a film’s stakes is to put an infant or pet in harm's way. What impresses most in Matteo Garrone’s Dogman is that it manages to take the crown of 2018’s most stressful film while...

Damien Chazelle trades in the arts for the sciences with First Man, focusing in on Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in this handsome, technically astonishing awards contender. It’s a surprising choice for the...

Though he may only appear in the film for 20 or so minutes, Chris Hemsworth is the key to Bad Times at the El Royale. Without being able to plaster his face and permanent shirtlessness onto every piece of...

An obvious crowd pleaser and Oscar-friendly awards player, it would be easy to underestimate Green Book. And while it is certainly formulaic, to ignore or dismiss it would be to miss out on one of the warmest...

Loosely adapted from Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead trades Roman politicking and murder for a disastrous family party where everyone is yelling and no one is listening. It might...

As one of the most rigorous and unflinching auteurs to emerge in the last decade, it would have been hard to guess that Steve McQueen’s fourth feature, Widows – his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years...

This review was originally published as part of our London Film Festival coverage on 11/10/2018. When is an epic not an epic? When nothing of note ever seems to happen. Jia Zhangke’s latest film has all...

This review was originally published as part of our London Film Festival coverage on 09/10/2018. As a writer-director-star of any given movie, you’re walking a fine line between uncompromising artistic...

How soon is too soon to make drama out of tragedy is a question that Hollywood has long wrestled with. 22 July director Paul Greengrass knows this terrain perhaps better than anyone, having helmed United 93...