Tagged 2014

You face a decision. You will kill millions. Or, you will watch the world burn around you. Sick to your guts you feel the cold dread of a desperately uncertain future. It’s time to decide. The premise...

A love letter from one provocauteur to another, written in dried blood and tired philosophy. Dafoe is assured as the controversial director, both in his tentative physicality and his soaring creative...

Philip (Schwartzman) is the man you'll love to hate. Ike (Pryce) is the man he could become. They are both tortured, selfish literary geniuses and Moss, Ritter and de La Baume are the women who suffer for...

Shrew’s Nest is a shrieking bloody mess of a film that just about clings onto enough sanity to tell a compelling and sinister story. Montse (Gómez) is too afraid to leave her house and when an injured...

A Girl At My Door lingers in the mind. The film is intelligent and enigmatic as it charts shifting equilibriums, a beautiful landscape and its convincingly flawed inhabitants. The impact is heightened by an...

El Niño possesses all the ingredients for an efficacious and addictive thriller. The eye-catching start - exploiting transit sights and sounds - ratchets up the tension and is followed by some action-packed...

Camp X-Ray establishes its identity with a vividly kinetic start, adeptly unveiling the Guantanamo Bay locale where soldiers “defend freedom”. The film intrigues with its subtlety and style, conveying...

Even for the occasional horror fan, The Babadook feels far too full of the usual clichés: a troubled child, a distressed (bereaved) mother and - what’s that? A haunted house? Writer and director Jennifer...

Go into A Most Wanted Man expecting the familiar tone and pace of fellow John le Carré adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and you won’t be disappointed. Corbijn’s direction is a little more gruff and...

Visually overflowing, and just about as ludicrous as it is "clever", Luc Besson's latest relies so heavily on pseudo-intellectualism that its outer world quickly falls away to pseudo-reality. Though...

The Congress looks at the state of modern Hollywood - actresses battling ageism, the cannibalising presence of CGI and mo-cap – and reflects back a metafictional gem. Folman’s adapted script is cynical...

The most astonishing achievement of Dawn is that within seconds you forget that every ape, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z, is played by a man in a skin-tight bodysuit. The dynamics of their new civilisation...

Last Love begins with Michael Caine attempting an American accent and wandering the streets of a rose-tinted Paris, in mourning. Having fallen in with Poésy, herself nursing issues - “I like your beard,...

Richard Linklater’s expertise - or at least his largest triumphs - has been in the capturing of rapidly burning candles. By comparison, Boyhood (a project filmed over twelve years) is a great fire; burning...

Dragons really are the myth du jour. Daenerys Targaryen’s beastly brood continues to incinerate all of HBO’s competition, while Smaug, Tolkien’s monstrous kleptomaniac, is looking to drag another $1bn of...