By 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 moreTodd Phillips’ Joker (2019) reimagined the supervillain origin story as a study of a fracturing mind with the beaten down incel Arthur Fleck transforming into the weirdly charismatic murdering psychopath clown of the title. In this age of superhero/ villain obsession it was an ambitious and subversive take on an iconic character but not always a riveting one. For those
Read moreIt’s been a while since we were subjected to a huge, lumbering, overly ambitious turkey of a film. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon looked to be heading that way but ended up as genuinely stylish and entertainingly bonkers. Francis Ford Coppola has stepped up to the plate, though, with his near unwatchable dystopian sci fi stinker Megalopolis. This was apparently a passion
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