Close-Up

The Joker is among the most formidable and fear-inspiring villains ever to grace the screen. He has become incredibly versatile and adaptable, his behaviour impossible to predict, leaving viewers vulnerable to...

On the 20th anniversary of Danny DeVito’s Matilda, it is obvious that there has been a distinct change in mainstream children’s film. Animation has overtaken live action, child stars have been replaced by...

Let it never be said that you can't track a nation's attitude by its cinema. Whether by proliferation or absence, topics are either brought to attention, or trigger groundswell when they're not...

Marvel Studios has a diversity problem. While I’m personally a big fan of the (admittedly sometimes formulaic) money printers that Kevin Feige and co. have masterminded over the last decade, representation...

It’s not all about Michael B. Jordan and the Wayans brothers. It is, but it isn’t. African Americans are not the only 2016 invitees cutting an impressive swathe through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts...

Memory is a difficult thing for cinema to dissect. It’s the most opaque, internal process we experience as humans, and therefore wholly unsuited to a medium as visual as film. Countless books that rely on...

Whit Stillman's new film, Love and Friendship, is notable not just for being such a rarity (being after all his fifth film in 26 years) but also for reuniting the stars of his cult classic The Last Days of...

Richard Linklater has been on a hell of a hot streak this past decade. A Best Picture nomination for Boyhood; a third flying visit to Jesse and Céline in Before Midnight; the criminally underappreciated...

When sociologist and philosopher Michel de Certeau climbed the World Trade Center to view New York he did so to remove himself from the city, so as to make sense of its enormity and component parts. He...

Ip Man (or Yip Man as he is sometimes known) has traditionally been an elusive figure for Western audiences far more familiar with his most famous student Bruce Lee. But the legendary Kung Fu Grandmaster has...

Frequently cited as his last great film, Akira Kurosawa's Ran shows the director at the height of his powers. The film, released in 1985, was a decade-long passion project for the septuagenarian director. Much...

Batman and Superman are currently clobbering each other through cinemas around the globe, but where did it all begin? One Room With A View casts the Bat Signal back through time, past the Nolan-noughties, past...

Dalton Trumbo, novelist and prolific screenwriter for nearly forty years from the 1930s, is to return to the public consciousness as a biopic of his life hits UK screens. Despite being an Oscar winner and the...

What is it about bankers and the fourth wall? Just like the banking institutions they work in, the lives of ordinary people, and the global economy, they can’t help but break it. Writer/director Adam...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens will likely become the highest-grossing film of all time come February. A wondrous return for the space opera: aliens, foreign lands, spacecrafts, lasers, and lots of bright...