Author Rory Steabler

Like News of the World protagonist Jefferson Kidd (Tom Hanks), Paul Greengrass has made a career spinning headline news into info-tainment for paying audiences. However, Greengrass’ latest is no meditation...

Below Zero is a mostly-solid action-thriller that knows how to steal from better movies, ratchet up the tension, and provide enough nasty twists to keep you invested. Its Con Air meets Assault on Precinct 13...

Ten years on from its release, True Grit has settled firmly into the middle ground of Joel and Ethan Coen’s filmography. It's well-respected in the Coen canon but doesn’t seem to be many people’s...

This film was previously reviewed in October 2019 as part of our London Film Festival coverage. County Lines is an impressive feature debut for director Henry Blake, who based the story on real incidents...

Ten years ago, Scott Pilgrim vs the World bombed at the box office. Director Edgar Wright had made a name for himself with his first two features: Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, a pair of gag-heavy genre...

Bruce Springsteen is a cowboy now. Please, nobody tell him any different. He seems happy. In the clips cut into Western Stars’ concert footage, the Boss tramps through the American desert in his dustiest...

Piranhas is at once a thoroughly conventional gangster movie and a fresh take on the genre. If you’ve seen a mob flick made since The Public Enemy you can guess most of the plot, but director Claudio...

Nelly Ben Hayoun has a Hannah Arendt fixation. The stated point of the charismatic designer/director’s new documentary is to use Arendt’s philosophy as a springboard to find “the origin of knowledge”....

The summary of Lingua Franca below could mislead you into expecting some sort of topical melodrama, featuring the big issues of today blown up to cinema scale. Instead, the film is a slow-paced, slice-of-life...

It’s hard to think of a better recent example of dad-approved lazy-afternoon viewing than James Mangold’s Le Mans ‘66. Its combination of old-fashioned motorsports, tough-guy heroes, and loving...

Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel The Sisters Brothers is very funny. Jacques Audiard’s new film adaptation of that novel is significantly less funny. Despite (or really, because of) this, the film is a great...

The long wait for writer-director Joe Cornish’s second feature is over, and The Kid Who Would Be King does not disappoint – though it may not be quite what fans of Attack the Block were expecting. While...

Peter Farrelly's Green Book may be a politically regressive movie directed by a onetime sex pest, but at least it also wastes three very talented actors. Viggo Mortensen has been a household name since his...

The story of Robin Hood is a story of remakes. The character has evolved in countless ways since his origins in (maybe) 14th-century folk ballads. Familiar elements of the legend – Maid Marian, the Sheriff...

True Romance turns 25 today. A quarter-century after that love letter to sex, violence, and Elvis Presley hit screens (and bombed), we have to ask ourselves: we’re all pretty much over Quentin Tarantino,...