One Off

“I always played older,” Olympia Dukakis once told the New York Times. “I think it was the voice.” From 40 years old, Dukakis was playing mothers of grown children and elder stateswomen - and...

In the realm of great storylines, “A formerly flamboyant hairdresser takes a long walk across a small town to style a dead woman's hair” certainly hits the jackpot. Throw in two contrasting legends in the...

Tangled has always had a bit of a mixed reputation. Although cinema-going audiences treated it fairly kindly, it struggled to make back its mammoth budget. Critics shrugged at it - complaining it was a little...

Glasgow Film Festival tends to slip under the radar: it comes immediately after the Berlinale, often coincides with or follows the Oscars, and tends to host mainly UK and Scottish premieres of films that have...

Not to brag, but we had a pretty great set of nominations for the ORWAV Oscars this year. We took the Academy's top picks enhanced them with some underappreciated gems, especially of the uncut variety. So...

Oscars season has arrived early this year, and with it comes one of the most eclectic sets of nominees we've seen in quite some time. Big hitters include a long-take (not one-take) WWI film, a serious...

In criticism, time-distance is everything: time to let a film sink in, time to give it more thought and more watches, and time to see what impact it has on the culture. Time also, often, for the artists...

The ground is littered with fantastic and fascinating titles that just failed to make our top 100 films of the decade: Margaret, Blade Runner 2049, Foxtrot. Somehow Michael Pearce’s “moody”, empty Ramsay...

Our countdown of the Top 100 Films of the Decade continues apace as we start reaching the titles with some very high aggregate scores. Debate continues to rage over the relative merits of (usually heavy)...

At its very best, cinema not only influences its audience but changes the very medium around it; a great film builds itself as it plays, showing you how to view it and redefining itself in real time. And this...

Another decade, another dollar – billions and billions of dollars, that is, spent on both making and watching films. Early 2010 saw Avatar clamber to the first-ever $2 billion gross, becoming the biggest...

The Farewell, written and directed by Lulu Wang, is fast being slotted into one of film culture’s more interesting reductive categories: the heartfelt indie that makes everyone cry. The very premise primes...

Stewart Lee once referred to Joanna Hogg’s second film Archipelago as “an art film about middle class people on a disappointing holiday”. On one level, he is right. There are also plenty of fair reasons...

Was the Flerken a tentacle too far? Perhaps it was Pet Sematary’s Church on the red carpet that pushed everything over the edge. Whatever it was, just when we were all feline a bit overwhelmed, along came...

New phase, new rules. Spider-Man: Far From Home has been marketed very heavily as the final piece of the Avengers: Endgame puzzle, but, along with Captain Marvel, it marks the beginning of a new era. He might...