THE GOOD DINOSAUR (2015)
[usr 3.0] Pixar’s second film of 2015 couldn’t be more different from its first. Whereas Inside Out was a complex, grown-up fantasy very much from...
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY – PART 2 (2015)
[usr 4] Mockingjay simply isn’t a very long book. It’s worth acknowledging that when pondering why it was a misguided decision to split the final...
STEVE JOBS (2015)
[usr 3.5] Biopics tend to follow a painfully familiar template. Frequently, out of an eagerness to not miss a single detail, films based on...
SPY (2015)
[usr 3.0] When she was a kid, Susan Cooper’s (Melissa McCarthy) mother used to leave a note in her lunchbox each day that read:...
BRAZIL (1985)
[usr 5.0] Bureaucracy on film is a subject that, for obvious reasons, has always been best approached by filmmakers working under authoritarian governments, specifically...
SPECTRE (2015)
[usr 3.5] To follow on from the billion-dollar box office success of 2012’s Skyfall must have been a bit of a daunting task for...
TOMORROWLAND (2015)
[usr 3.0] One of this summer’s biggest box-office disappointments was Disney’s Tomorrowland, from director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, Ratatouille). It made $208m worldwide,...
POLTERGEIST (2015)
[usr 2.0] Tobe Hooper’s original Poltergeist is a great film and the story of its production has become legend, so even a good remake’s doomed to sit...
BEASTS OF NO NATION (2015)
[usr 2] Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director, writer, producer and cinematographer of Beasts of No Nation, has an eye for striking images. Which is...
PAN (2015)
[usr 2.5] Early reviews suggested that Joe Wright’s Peter Pan prequel (which purports to tell how he became The Boy Who Never Grew Up)...
JURASSIC WORLD (2015)
[usr 4.0] The Jurassic Park franchise has always been looking back 65 million years (wondering how modern man would cope with the return of...
WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (2014)
[usr 4.0] Times are tough for traditional, two-dimensional, hand drawn animation. The mainstream is dominated with glossy, shiny, digitally-animated movies that, while often hits...