Close-Up

Garlanded with seven Golden Globes and 11 BAFTA nominations, generating some serious Oscar buzz and collecting rave reviews, La La Land is the hottest ticket in town. A joyful Hollywood-set picture and a...

Barack Obama is not a fan of Black Orpheus. In his memoir Dreams of My Father, the outgoing President recalls that it was his mother’s favourite film, but when she took him to see it, he "suddenly realised...

Men are weak-minded, egocentric and, for the most part, doomed to fail. For the past four decades of his career, Martin Scorsese has mined his way through the male psyche, warts and all. To some, he may be...

A father abandons his family. He lies, cheats and betrays them, spending most of the family fortune. When present, he’s cruel: blunt and caustic with his children, putting them down in painful moments and...

Mixing hip-hop flair with the samurai ethos, arthouse cool with wild action sequences, and Forest Whitaker with a bunch of birds, Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai couldn’t be a stranger,...

To say that Adam Sandler has been poorly received by critics over the years would be something of an understatement. Jack and Jill currently holds the record for the most Razzie awards won in a single night,...

Is Akira Kurosawa the greatest filmmaker of all time? There have certainly been crazier claims than that. Such unimpeachable masterpieces as Drunken Angel, Rashômon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood,...

The release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them marks J.K. Rowling’s first screenwriting credit. Yet authors adapting their own work for the screen is neither a new nor a particularly rare practice....

Space Jam was released in the United States exactly 20 years ago. That’s a lifetime. That could be many lifetimes. That’s five presidential terms – in fact, it coincided with the 1996 election that saw...

For many it must have been simply implausible that Nicolas Roeg's fourth feature could work at all. David Bowie's star power aside - the rock icon was operating at the peak of his powers by the mid-1970s -...

Andrea Arnold is a filmmaker who stands out for a number of reasons, but her focus on social realism as a subject and style is one that stands out more than others. Before American Honey, her first American...

If you were to glance at the Amazon reviews for Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights you would find a storm of one-star reviews. Most of the ire seems to come from fans of Emily Brontë’s...

Blue Jasmine starts the same way that any other Woody Allen film does. Yet that’s where most of the similarities end between his other works, and his greatest film in years. Blue Jasmine shares standard...

The first three films made by the Coen Brothers are all great. Excellent, in fact. But Barton Fink is the first that really showed their genius; that they are two of the preeminent filmmakers of our time....

Todd Solondz's debut feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse, serves up almost the very definition of black comedy. 21 years since its TIFF premiere, and on the eve of its pseudo-sequel Wiener-Dog finding UK...