Picking an Oscar Best Picture winner from this year's nominees can't have been an easy task (aside from ensuring Bohemian Rhapsody got nowhere near the trophy, of course.) Green Book took many by surprise as the winner but, for those who've seen it, there isn't another film more deserving. As I mentioned in my previous review, the drama genre is certainly going through a boom but a lot of the recent successes are very serious, mature, slow-burning beasts. Green Book arrives a

The drama genre has had a bit of a renaissance in recent times with slow-building, realistic cinema hoovering up the big awards. Think Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Manchester by the Sea, Lion and Best Picture winner Moonlight. The latter was many folk’s introduction to Barry Jenkins, a director still very much in his infancy but already carving out a distinctive style and top-table reputation. He follows that startlingly moving film with an adaptation of If Beal

We were told five years ago now, in a thinly veiled bit of irony, that ‘Everything is Awesome’, that we should stick together and be open to change. Five years later and the message has been changed to ‘Everything’s Not Awesome’ but the fact that we can acknowledge and accept this is a good thing as we can look to a brighter future. This message is delivered by two dots and a smile in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and, once again, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (alongside dir

With all the imagination of storytellers, script-writers and authors the greatest villains are often facsimiles of real life figures. And sometimes real life figures are the worst villains of all. Vice tells the story of Dick Cheney, one such figure of villainy. The silent, calculated force behind the Bush administration and a man with a lot of blood on his many pie-dipped fingers. Of course, this is a left-leaning film keen to vilify this heretofore lesser known individual b

Ducks (racing ducks, no less), copious rabbits and, yes, lobsters (nice reference) all feature heavily in Yorgos Lanthimos’ period drama The Favourite. If that doesn’t indicate to you that this film is anything but traditional then perhaps the sight of Nicholas Hoult in OTT period dress will, or the contrapuntal string stabs of the score or Lanthimos’ brilliant use of the fish-eye lens as he pans across long corridors. For The Favourite is not traditional, as we should know t

Two years ago to the day I was pondering M. Night Shyamalan’s Split: an exciting and original thriller with a tour-de-force, multiple personality performance by James McAvoy that ultimately fell a little short with an ending that didn’t quite do the rest of the film justice and somewhat shoehorned the film into the universe of an earlier Shyamalan classic: Unbreakable. It was a welcome, if bizarre, twist that suddenly thrust the director back into the spotlight and we’ve seen

Well Happy New Year to you all and welcome to 2019 which, as I’m sure you’ve seen as you can’t move for think-pieces on the subject, is bound to be a quite incredible year for cinema. The giddy heights that some of 2018’s best films took us to seem merely a precursor to 2019’s amalgamation of peaks: the end of the Infinity War, the end of the Skywalker saga and a talking Pikachu. Without further ado then, we’re welcomed into the new year by a returning Robert Zemeckis and an

It might be six years after the fact but Wreck-It Ralph has finally been granted its thoroughly deserved sequel by Disney. The first film felt like an attempt by the Mouse House to take a pinch of Pixar's post-modernism and was a fresh and delightful take on videogames, a sort of arcade-based Toy Story if you will. Because it didn't come from Pixar (who released the distinctly Disney-esque Brave the same year, ironically) it's generally sneaked under the radar but with videog

Despite Sylvester Stallone's protestations, the Rocky saga keeps on running with Creed II not necessarily bringing the curtain down on the franchise. Ryan Coogler's first Creed film was such an unexpected joy, and of course a huge stepping stone to Black Panther, that a sequel was inevitable and whilst it, predictably, doesn't quite live up to its predecessor it does a good job of justifying its existence beyond being a money spinner. Steven Caple Jr. steps into the director'

After squabbles, in-fighting and more shuffling than a Vegas casino I present the best films of 2018: 20. The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs...

You may remember Aquaman as the hulkingly charismatic, slightly drunk wildcard of the Justice League pack given nothing to do other than occasionally whooping whilst holding a trident. Giving him an entirely solo film then (before Batman and The Flash, no less) appears a brave decision by DC and one to be applauded after the triumph that was Wonder Woman, a chance for them to throw off the dark and dingy shackles and inject some fun into this ailing superhero universe. Pleasi

Another tumultuous year has seen musicians trying ever more disparate ways to comment on our times or simply distract us from them....