All good teams lose sometimes and so it is that Captain America: Brave New World doesn’t usher in the 'brave' and 'new' world of its title so much as, shockingly, a valid contender for the worst film of the entire and storied franchise that is the MCU. It’s hard to know quite how we got to this point. Marvel smartly took a breath last year in their hectic release schedule, released Deadpool & Wolverine to record numbers and teased and announced some really exciting projects f

The ‘Black Mirror-inspired’ sci-fi/dark comedy/horror is a rich genre starting to get full with modern greats and prescient stories sure to hold good reply value. The most recent entry: Companion maybe doesn’t quite hit the heights of the best of this little subcategory but is, nonetheless, a brilliantly fun little trip to the cinema. A hugely entertaining mash up that, simultaneously, has a tongue-in-cheek feel as well as a very cleverly delivered moral message about toxic r

Hard Truths is a hard watch. Nonetheless, Mike Leigh’s latest is simultaneously heart-warming, funny, truthful and truly sad. Leigh brilliantly puts the human condition on the screen in this family drama, set over the course of a few days in suburban London. There’s no grand, sweeping narrative and no redemption arc, just a tight and razor-sharp script and a film that unspools almost like a play. Marianne Jean-Baptiste really should have been Oscar-nominated for her performan

September 5 is another great addition to the always brilliant, but generally underrated, genre: the ‘journalism thriller.’ Telling the harrowing story of the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis from the perspective of the ABC news crew who documented proceedings live to the world. It makes for a brilliant companion piece to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, a very different film covering the same events and their aftermath. Immersing us in its 70's television newsroom setting, bizar

If Flight Risk had come out in its spiritual home of the 1990’s there’s a chance it could now be regarded as a cult classic. A typically of-the-time, all-in-one-setting, quasi-real-time thriller made up of some brilliantly fun but brilliantly batshit moments. It’s rather an outlier for Mel Gibson but is a big, dumb, silly film that knows exactly what it is. It’s a classic B-movie cinema experience which will have you laughing at it as much as with it at points but it’s easy t

It’s hard, sometimes, to judge or appraise something by virtue of it being ‘high art’ or ‘low art’ and there is value in every type of artistic expression. A doodle can elicit as much of a smile as a painting in a museum. Sometimes, though, a piece of clear ‘high art’ arrives that lands as a marker, a milestone of the times it is born in. Something that just cannot be denied. The Brutalist is so clearly one of these pieces that is hard to be subjective about it. We are so fre

I’ve written a lot recently about biopics and also, when discussing Nosferatu, posited the difficulty of defining something iconic. Combine those two trains of thought and, with A Complete Unknown, James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet have the unenviable task of defining the undefinable Bob Dylan, whilst also choosing how to frame his story. What ensues is a generally traditional biopic but with a slightly meandering and dreamlike intangibility which, like its subject, keeps u

It must be daunting trying to create the definitive version of something so well known. Make that doubly difficult when there have been countless adaptations and the resurgent genre you’re releasing into is awash with new ideas that could make yours look stale and old-fashioned. Robert Eggers’ take on Nosferatu is, therefore, something to be hugely appreciated and admired. It may not sit at the very top of the vampire tree but is certainly a contender and its wide reach, box

Pablo Larraín releases his third stately and eloquent biopic and may have topped his previous two efforts with Maria. This, the story of opera singer Maria Callas, follows his depictions of Jackie Kennedy (Jackie) and Diana Spencer (Spencer) and lovingly fits in almost as a semi-sequel to the former. This is an equally brave, elegant and beautiful film as those other two and uses a slightly altered biopic format to tell a more filmic and visually arresting story. As the final

Saturday Night is a different kind of biopic, telling the story of the moments before the very first broadcast of SNL. It’s an absolutely chaotic, almost real-time rollercoaster of a film which takes the Birdman approach of a roving backstage camera checking in on a series of escalating events. It won’t be to all tastes but has a wonderful sense of place and immaculate production values. It’s a searingly impressive feat of choreography and production and there are some wonder

A Real Pain is such a perfect, double-meaning title for Jesse Eisenberg’s thought-provoking, charming, funny and brilliant new film. It's a sweet and sour buddy comedy following two Jewish cousins who go on a tour of Poland after the death of their grandmother to honour her legacy. There they find kinship, ponder their differences and try to find meaning in their feelings of modern pain when cast against that felt in history. It’s such a simple idea layered and imbued with de

Much like we learn about his career itself, against all the odds Robbie Williams’ story Better Man joins the top table of music biopics. Unremittingly bleak, defiantly anti-crowd-pleasing at points and, most brazenly, cast as a CGI monkey, Better Man perfectly picks the parts of biopic convention to honour and those to upend as it smashes all before it. It’s hard to overstate the sheer bravery of the thing. For the director of The Greatest Showman and a huge pop artist ostens