It feels like decades since Richard Dreyfuss, Best Actor Oscar winner for The Goodbye Girl, headlined a movie. The star of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind goes back into space in Astronaut, a gentle ‘follow your dream’ Canadian drama that plays – extremely well – to an older audience. Dreyfuss is on great form as Angus, a seventy-five year-old curmudgeonly grandfather with … Continue reading Astronaut – Review
If there is one thing we know from the movies, it is that American High Schools have factions. They train people to adapt to ‘house’ life in universities and then condition them to be ruthless business leaders or media moguls. You don’t necessarily make your own faction; you might inherit it and feel obliged to keep it going like some bad tradition. However, it shapes … Continue reading Selah and the Spades – Review
Writer-director Shola Amoo’s debut feature, A Moving Image, about the gentrification of Brixton, a neighbourhood of South West London predominantly occupied by Afro-Caribbean residents from the 1940s to the early 2010s, was a didactic and at times tedious work that straddled drama and documentary. It does not prepare you for his exceptional second feature, The Last Tree, in which Amoo redefines what we think of … Continue reading The Last Tree – Sundance Film Festival London Review
In a marketing move that went awry, the American police shooting drama, The Hate U Give inspired mass walkouts at ‘Cineworld Unlimited’ Surprise Preview screenings across the UK on 8 October. The last Cineworld Unlimited screening was The Incredibles 2 so audiences were primed for a tentpole release. Fearing it might be the new Hallowe’en movie anxious parents contacted Cineworld sites to ask whether their … Continue reading The Hate U Give – Review
So many films claim to offer an immersive experience. The Rider achieves this without so much as a 3D gimmick. Director Chloé Zhao’s film tells the story of a Dakota based horse trainer and rodeo rider, Brady Blackburn (real life horse trainer Brady Jandreau) who is recovering from a severe head injury. He desperately wants to get on a horse again, but everyone around him says … Continue reading The Rider – Review
British actor Harris Dickinson is a star in the making. He has nabbed the lead role in director Danny Boyle’s new ten-part television series, Trust, in which he plays John Paul Getty III in the other screen version (after Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World) of the infamous 1973 kidnapping. You’ll see him in September opposite Amandla Stenberg in director Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s … Continue reading Unpopped Kernels: Beach Rats (2017)
