Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Review Tom Bond August 14, 2019 Reviews This review was originally published as part of our Cannes Festival coverage on 23/05/2019. It’s impossible to view Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as anything other than a filmmaker in the twilight of his...
Good Boys – Review Tom Bond August 14, 2019 Reviews Based on its trailer, you might expect Good Boys to be an embarrassment of sex jokes pushed upon kids too inexperienced to make them funny. While there is the occasional misfire, Lee Eisenberg and Gene...
Top 10 Movie Moments of 2019… So Far Tom Bond July 5, 2019 Analysis, Features, Top 10 Every summer we like to glance back at the first half of the year and ask that all-important question: which specific moments in film did you love, regardless of the quality of the film itself? Because it's...
Spider-Man: Far From Home – Review Tom Bond June 30, 2019 Reviews Spider-Man: Far From Home is the perfect film to follow the triumph and heartbreak of Avengers: Endgame, and deliver a fitting epilogue to Marvel’s Phase 3. It’s a teen film in every meaning of the word,...
Support the Girls – Review Tom Bond June 27, 2019 Reviews Mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski has always been preoccupied with the world of work and how it shapes people’s lives. His latest film, Support the Girls, puts an explicitly feminist slant on that topic,...
Feminism vs Capitalism in Support the Girls Tom Bond June 27, 2019 Analysis, Close-Up, Features Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls is undoubtedly a feminist film, despite being set in a Hooters-esque sports bar where the staff flirt for tips in low-cut tops. Its greatness lies in how it pits its cast...
Yesterday – Review Tom Bond June 27, 2019 Reviews Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and the world had forgotten The Beatles. If you were an aspiring musician at the end of their tether you couldn’t wish for a better gift. This is the genius concept of...
Best Films Never Made #43: The Beatles and Joe Orton’s Up Against It Tom Bond June 24, 2019 Behind The Curtain, Best Films Never Made, Features In 1967, The Beatles were the most famous band in the world. Maybe they were even the most famous people in the world. Just a year earlier John Lennon had claimed they were “bigger than Jesus”, and it was...
Nina Wu – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 27, 2019 Reviews Nina Wu comes at a perfect moment, hot on the heels of the #MeToo movement which finally challenged longstanding abusive practices in the film industry. Its tale of power, control, and the male gaze is a...
Matthias & Maxime – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 27, 2019 Reviews Xavier Dolan's had a tough few years. The Canadian wunderkind's last two efforts It's Only the End of the World and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan have bombed hard, but in Matthias & Maxime he...
Ice on Fire – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 23, 2019 Reviews In a sane world, Ice on Fire wouldn't exist. Mass global audiences would've been woken up by the comprehensive climate change warnings of An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006, rather than simply stirring in...
Frankie – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 22, 2019 Reviews Any film not made for mass audiences is always at risk of sliding into a montage of first world problems, such is the class barrier that remains in the film industry. Frankie is a great example of this...
La Belle Époque – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 22, 2019 Reviews What would you give to go back and experience any point in history however you wished? Time travel may be impossible, but considering the relentless march of technology and filmmaking it’s not inconceivable...
Young Ahmed – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 22, 2019 Reviews A film about a Muslim teenager’s radicalisation directed by two white men was always going to be controversial, no matter that those men are the legendary Dardennes brothers. The worry was that they would...
Diego Maradona – Cannes 2019 Review Tom Bond May 20, 2019 Reviews A great man once said that football isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s much more important than that. Asif Kapadia’s intense Diego doc adds religion to the list, focusing on the brief few years when...