Nostalgia

MacGruber: making life-saving inventions out of household materials. How many films feature a primary antagonist falling to their death? Die Hard, sure. The Return of the King, check. GoldenEye, there’s...

Explaining what happens in Cloud Atlas is surprisingly simple. Explaining why it deserves to be loved and admired is a little harder. The story (based on a novel by David Mitchell) is in fact six separate...

In Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2001 send-up of the fashion industry, the shadowy controlling figures of the trade task leading designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell) with finding a suitable candidate to assassinate the...

Little Miss Sunshine is an emotional rollercoaster of a film which is as sweet and comic as it is serious and tragic. The film tells the story of the Hoover family driving from New Mexico to California for...

Over the years, negative assessments of Keira Knightley’s acting abilities have included the phrases ‘woeful’ and ‘so bloody awful it hurts my eyes’, with many critiques specifically focussing on the...

Elysium was the kind of movie that had a lot going against it from the moment it was announced. South African director Neill Blomkamp's debut, District 9, came out of nowhere and stunned critics and...

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not considered high art, or even a piece of exceptional filmmaking. It is pulpy, frequently juvenile, and arguably nonsensical. It's a kitsch comedy musical, peddling...

For many, their first exposure to Spanish-German actor Daniel Brühl was in 2009's Inglourious Basterds, or even more recently in 2013's Rush. However, Brühl has been acting since the beginning of the new...

The last instalment of Welcome to the ‘80s discussed Will Gluck’s Easy A, and the way it emulates and alludes to many of the classic ‘80s films considered in this series. This time around we take a look...

South Africa was on the brink of civil war in the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison was not the start of the troubles - he had been in prison for decades for fighting the institutional...

Less than a week into the new year we can finally sit back and rest after December’s blur of Christmas shopping and family visits. Everything is beginning to go back to normal now, and we have almost...

Trading Places (1983) is not a film often mentioned on many people’s list of favourite Christmas films. Though it may not have as many obvious festive touch-points as revered classics such as It’s a...

90 minutes in a box. That is one way to describe Buried, directed by Rodrigo Cortes and starring the much-maligned Ryan Reynolds. As the title implies, the film centres upon Paul (Ryan Reynolds), a US...

For evidence of the enduring popularity of ‘80s screen stories one need look no further than the recent plethora of remakes like Fame and Footloose, and West End musical adaptations such as Back to the...

Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera is a trial and its two hours have sticky minutes. Certainly I am unable to watch it all in one sitting; it feels like a lifetime. Perhaps this was intentional in...