Author Jack Blackwell

In adapting a play to the screen, there’s a tough balance to strike. You have to retain the essence of the original production without the limitations of that medium carrying over into the film. Earlier this...

To call a movie set in two distinct time periods a "film of two halves" might seem overly trite, but unfortunately, it’s the best possible descriptor for Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Taking place in both...

A Fantastic Woman arrives at the London Film Festival with a lot of prestige behind it. Sebastian Lelio’s film won the Silver Lion at Berlin after rave reviews, and boasts both Pablo Larraín and Maren Ade...

It's a strange cinematic coincidence, but the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings have proved fertile ground for two excellent recent films – first with Peter Berg’s nail-biting Patriots Day, and now with the...

Apocalypses loom large in the world of Loveless, from the impending implosion of a family that gives the film its story to its setting in October 2012, with the Mayan calendar predicting the world’s end in...

Other than its central true story’s premise, one that is remarkable yet unfamiliar, there is almost nothing to surprise in Stephen Frears’ Victoria and Abdul. An awards season period piece, it plays out...

Both booed and applauded at the end of its first screening at Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a raucous, vicious horror-thriller that also happens to be utter nonsense. It hangs together...

As hinted by its nicely simple title, Jim & Andy is a documentary exploring the brilliant but difficult comedy minds of Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman, centring on how those minds became one on the...

A rare foray into more genre-style filmmaking for master of small family dramas Hirokazu Koreeda, The Third Murder is a slow-burning, twisty mystery that is ultimately too convoluted to really satisfy as a...

Deliberately opaque for its first 20 minutes, it’s hard to see exactly what film Sebastiano Riso’s Una Famiglia actually is for a good while after it starts. Come the end, you’ll wish it never revealed...

A sensationally funny and affecting dark comedy, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri arrived at Venice just as the festival was hitting a slump, and has reinvigorated it with a fiery passion. Martin...

The highlight of any season of the FX anthology American Horror Story is always the creepy and evocative opening titles based on whatever that year’s theme is. At 90 seconds long, they’re perfect snapshots...

Paolo Virzi’s The Leisure Seeker wastes no time getting started. No sooner are we introduced to its world than we are listening to a phone call of a son screaming at his sister that their sickly old parents...

Self-indulgent, glacially slow, and painfully boring, Robert Guédiguian’s The House by the Sea is atrocious. It’s baffling that it made it through the screening process to play in Competition at Venice,...

With mystery films, it’s often said that trailers should be avoided, and that going in blind is the best way to watch them. Suburbicon is an exception to this rule, as the final product bears very little...