Writer/director Sean Baker distinguished himself as an ultra-low budget filmmaker intrigued by the lives of people on society’s fringes such as transgender sex worker Sin-Dee in Tangerine and volatile single mother Halley in The Florida Project. After these raw and confronting films, he seemed to lose his way with the long rambling Red Rocket. His latest film, the Palm D’or
Read moreWicked is the hotly anticipated cinema adaptation of the hugely successful musical theatre production of the same name. I haven’t seen the stage version and all I knew was that it was a prequel of sorts to The Wizard Of Oz that involved origin stories for the good witch Glinda and the wicked witch Elphaba. The filmmakers certainly believe in
Read moreBy the end of the 20th century, the ‘gladiator movie’ had fallen out of favour having become something of a punchline after the genre was mocked in Flying High. That abruptly changed in 2000, however, when Russell Crowe as the noble General Maximus pontificated his way to superstardom in Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator. The success of that sword clanging extravaganza
Read moreOpening this year’s British Film Festival was the moving if uneven World War Two home front drama, Blitz from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. Blitz is at times surprising and quite radical in a way that’s guaranteed to provoke conservatives but in other ways it’s very old fashioned and reminiscent of much-loved childhood adventure stories like The Railway
Read moreFor over 50 years British auteur Mike Leigh has been powerfully depicting the lives of disaffected people and those who don’t fit society’s prescribed mould. Who could forget Lesley Manville as the desperately lonely outsider in Leigh’s brilliant Another Year. His films are uniquely insightful about the human condition but often difficult to watch. The title of Leigh’s latest film,
Read moreThere’s something weirdly meta and unsettling about sitting in a room as a film critic watching a movie about a fiendishly pompous and self-centred critic, in this case a theatre scribe. In Anand Tucker’s The Critic, Sir Ian McKellen’s gleefully malevolent performance as London theatre critic James Erskine is the highlight of an uneven film. With his notorious poison pen,
Read more