Let’s start this review boldly and say that Red Sparrow is exponentially better than the widely-middling critical consensus. Far more of a 'European Bond' than the much-touted 'Black-Widow-in-all-but-name', Francis Lawrence’s latest is another victim of poor marketing. The combination of Francis and namesake Jennifer Lawrence (no relation) has, thus far, led to huge success in the YA waters of The Hunger Games and the widespread press for this film has posited it as the begin

The last of the Best Picture nominations to make it to these shores (but, *spoiler alert*, didn’t win) is the much-heralded Lady Bird. Smashing Rotten Tomatoes records on release we’ve been forced to wait patiently for Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age tale wrapped in a love letter to Sacramento, California. The titular Lady Bird is a self-given nom de plume of Christine, a college senior with our favourite coming-of-age hallmarks: a dysfunctional

It takes something truly special to upstage Spider-Man’s long-awaited integration into the MCU but that’s how I, and plenty of others, felt when we laid eyes on Black Panther way back when in Captain America: Civil War. The suit, the mysterious backstory and the promise of a future trip to Wakanda stood out in a film hardly short of stand-out moments. It’s been a long time coming, amid plenty of press furore, but we have the solo film we’ve been waiting for and the last piece

We haven’t had much luck recently when it comes to Young Adult trilogy closers. Since the triumphant close to the Harry Potter series the quality has significantly dipped from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay double-bill, which just felt a little lacklustre, to the Divergent series' final film Allegiant being completely cancelled altogether. The Maze Runner has posited itself as the closest competitor to The Hunger Games in recent times but itself ran into bad luck when it came t

There’s something about the dramatic tension and psychological depth you can wring from a movie about an individual sport. Team sports can be good fodder for comedy (Dodgeball, Cool Runnings) or back office drama (Moneyball) but are, more often than not, to be found in the bargain bins of the world whereas some of the greatest movies ever made centre on solo sports (see Raging Bull, Rocky, The Wrestler, Black Swan et al.) Whether biopics or fictional creations the plight of t

The Shape of Water leading the Oscar nominations was most likely a surprise to some on announcement. An old fashioned, romantic love story disguised as fantasy beating off competition from more prescient, ‘worthy’, political pieces seemed incongruous. Perhaps what the world needs though is a classic love story for the ages, which is exactly what Guillermo Del Toro has given us here in what is quite comfortably his best film since the immortal Pan’s Labyrinth. A thoroughly vin

Pixar’s releases can often feel like they crest a cultural wave. Toy Story set the benchmark for animation in the nineties and kickstarted its renaissance. The Incredibles predated the superhero boon and still stands as one of its best examples and Inside Out was a pioneering look at emotions and personality. Coco is the next to feel particularly prescient in the current climate. A treatise on death, family and remembrance deeply rooted in Mexican tradition and style and voic

We’ve got to the stage where any historical event can be canonised in celluloid. Some strike as barrel-scraping but with certain films it’s amazing to think how it’s never been shot before. The Post is one to file under the latter category. With the Watergate scandal just around the corner (something brilliantly alluded to here) The Pentagon Papers are less discussed in the public eye, but these events lit the touch paper on the press calling out its officiators and are of va

There are certain stories, legends, morality tales etc. destined to be retold, reinterpreted and reimagined ad infinitum. Some have already been perfected and are only rehashed to satiate diminishing cinema audiences. Some haven’t got a definitive interpretation or are so worthy they should be brought regularly back to audiences and generations. Winston Churchill certainly falls into the latter category and Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour stakes a claim to giving us cinema’s defini

Every so often an idea comes along that’s so forehead-slappingly brilliant it’s difficult to fathom how it hasn’t been done before. Alexander Payne’s (Director and screenplay) Downsizing is one such example. A Black Mirror-esque vision of the future so scarily prescient and curiously relatable that it feels like an important comment on the modern world. In short (pun intended) a Norwegian company have invented a process of ‘cellular miniaturisation’, a process whereby people,

As with every genre, the Western is having a bit of a mini-revival at the moment with filmmakers using its desolate locales and wanton hostility to make a comment on current politics and international relations. We’ve seen Tarantino release two brilliant examples recently in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, the spectacular The Revenant and HBO’s brilliant Westworld TV adaptation and Netflix’s Godless. You could argue that War for the Planet of the Apes picks up these t

January is THE month for the UK film connoisseur. Dark mornings and cold, rainy days be damned as we’re treated to an influx of films that the US got to enjoy last year. 2017 saw big hitters like La La Land, Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea come our way and we’re set in 2018 to enjoy The Shape of Water, Coco, Ladybird and Downsizing amongst others which have received rave reviews, awards and ‘best of year’ listings across the pond. Those aforementioned 2017 examples settle