Love Letter

By the end of Mary Poppins, it's easy to mistake its warmth for simplicity. As moving as it is, it's basic as all hell: two hours and 20 minutes just build up to George Banks learning a lesson and embracing...

Today, it may be a truth universally acknowledged that the internet is Dark and Full of Terrors – but it wasn’t always this way. 20 years ago, Nora Ephron beckoned audiences into a beautiful fantasy world,...

Lawrence of Arabia is often remembered for its immense scale, staggeringly large and well-coordinated set pieces, and other such enormities – like the 258-day shooting time. But a less-often mentioned aspect...

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...

Creating horror remakes is often a thankless job. Taking familiar intellectual properties with built-in audience recognition and repackaging them with a little more sex or violence than the originals were...

Like the great Michael Myers himself, you can never really kill a horror franchise. This month, 40 years after the original slashed its way onto movie screens and into our hearts, Halloween returns. Pointedly...

Screenwriter extraordinaire Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, World War Z, The Martian) is back with his second feature as a director, Bad Times at the El Royale. His latest finds a group of strangers unravelling a...

Rushmore is 20 years old. Even with a two-decade legacy that reaches into cinema’s hallowed history to map out its future, Wes Anderson’s singular screwball tale of love, betrayal and extracurricular...

When it came out in 2003, School of Rock was deemed a "sleeper hit". Though it was obviously intriguing enough to investors, it does sound pretty unremarkable: washed-up musician tries to teach preppy kids how...

Pawel Pawlikowski, winner of the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Cold War, has become one of the world’s top contemporary auteurs almost by stealth. He’s not a filmmaker who...

For many a comedy fan, The Muppets was the start of a lifelong love of entertainment. Playing the music, lighting the lights, celebrity guest stars aplenty, and a gang of Muppets to offer guaranteed laughs...

The faults of Mamma Mia! are well known; the singing is bad, the choreography is simple, and the plot is weak. Its strengths, on the other hand, are barely mentioned – strange for a film that made...

Thracian gladiators. Highland knights. Petulant teenagers. These are the kinds of people who are born to lead revolutions. Courageous defiance comes with the territory of being a sword bearing, bow-wielding...

Behind its fanciful premise; its lush, heightened production design; and a thick, swirling cloud of ambient Sigur Rós atmospherics, Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic is an incredibly frank film. Its musings...

War films generally have a hero. They pay lip service to the received wisdom that war is hell and people shouldn’t have to get caught up in it, but for the most part there are still clear ethical boundaries...