A Quiet Place Part II – Review Anna McKibbin May 22, 2021 Reviews A Quiet Place Part II doesn’t pick up where the last one left off. Instead, the first ten minutes are spent remembering the first day of the deadly invasion which drives the plot of both films. Excited...
Wild Mountain Thyme – Review Louise Burrell May 2, 2021 Reviews Two childhood sweethearts (Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan) who have never quite managed to express their love for one another find themselves mixed up in a dispute over their families’ farmland. That is...
An Ode to Mary Poppins’ Element of Fun Calum Baker December 22, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia 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...
Mary Poppins Returns – Review Sian Brett December 19, 2018 Reviews While not technically part of the trend for live-action Disney remakes, Mary Poppins Returns has a symmetry with the 1964 film that is hard to miss. There’s Americans playing cockneys, children stepping into...
My Summer of Love: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Finest Hour Patrick Nabarro August 30, 2018 Features, Love Letter 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...
Love Letter – Sicario (2015) Jack Blackwell June 26, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia 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...
Sherlock Gnomes – Review David Brake May 12, 2018 Reviews INT. OFFICE CONFERENCE ROOM – DAY Two executives pace in a large conference room. Following Gnomeo and Juliet’s surprise success, the studio begin to plan for a sequel… EXECUTIVE 1: Gnomeo and...
A Quiet Place – Review Stephanie Watts April 6, 2018 Reviews A Quiet Place is, believe it or not, a quiet movie (not for fans of bringing loud movie snacks to the cinema). Following a family surviving in a world overrun with monsters with highly sensitive hearing –...
A Love Letter to Rian Johnson’s Looper Joni Blyth December 14, 2017 Analysis, Features, Love Letter The Last Jedi is going to make Rian Johnson a star. Since Summer 2014, the film world has waited in heady anticipation for not only the true follow-up to legendary sequel Empire Strikes Back, but also this...
By The Book: The Girl On The Train Stephanie Watts October 11, 2016 Analysis, By The Book, Features Welcome to By the Book, where we compare books with their cinematic adaptations. Are they faithful and delightful partners in storytelling, or are the authors turning in their graves through these unholy...
Scene Stealers: Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada Sian Brett June 30, 2016 Analysis, Features, Scene Stealers If I said the name Emily Blunt to you, what would you think of? Do you think of the way she’s carving a pretty good name for herself in action movies as a woman? The fact that she’s married to John...
Your Week in Film – Poppins, The Rock and Ready Player Rogue One Eddie Falvey June 3, 2016 News 1. Rogue One scheduled for summer reshoots While the first trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was generally well received, it is fair to say that it was a little on the dour side. Well according to...
Casting Call – James Bond Tom Bond May 19, 2016 Behind The Curtain, Casting Call, Features 2 Comments With today's news appearing to confirm what we all suspected - that Daniel Craig will not return as 007 - who are the best candidates to take over the most coveted role in British film? Tom Hiddleston...
The Huntsman: Winter’s War – Review Rachel Brook April 7, 2016 Reviews This belated follow up to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman is confusingly both prequel and sequel, with Snow White’s absence awkwardly conspicuous. It threatens to be bloated, patronising, and...
Sicario – Review Phil W. Bayles October 9, 2015 Reviews Early in Sicario, a shady government operative compares finding a cartel boss to “discovering a vaccine.” It’s a throwaway line, but it resonates in Roger Deakins’ breathtaking (and surely Oscar...