Reviews
We’re off to see the wizard – again – in Wicked: For Good, part two of the origin story of the bad and good witch, Elphaba and Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. It remains fascinating politically – Glinda the Good is actually Glinda the Horribly Compromised. And the Wicked Witch turns out to be … Read more
Not taking many chances, but not making any mistakes either, King Richard is a grown-up Hollywood movie made in the classic style – no tricks, no experiments – with a solid Will Smith at its centre, as Richard Williams, the driven father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams. The Williams sisters have exec-producer credits … Read more
A CGI animation featuring penguins which comes along in the wake of March of the Penguins, so it’s probably pushing at an open door. And unlike a lot of animated films about animals, this one sets its stall out really quickly. Emperor penguins, it seems, all have a special song that they use in courtship. … Read more
And so we come to A Touch of Brimstone, an episode that didn’t make it onto US TV screens in 1966, thanks to the bondage gear that Mrs Peel eventually gets into in the final scene. How we get there is pretty interesting too. The whole thing opens very cinematically with a lovely shot of … Read more
When Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was first proposed, no one imagined that the sequel to the huge hit of 2018 was going to be made without its star. Chadwick Boseman died in 2020, having kept his battles with colon cancer super-heroically to himself. What to do? Cast someone else in his place? It was an … Read more
Simple and powerful, Tori and Lokita is the latest example of a film by the Dardenne brothers, a film-making duo who these days have to clear a high bar to get real praise, one raised by their own string of good-shading-to-great films. Two Days One Night, The Kid with a Bike, Lorna’s Silence, pick a … Read more
“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and … Read more
A poet of the mundane, Hong Sang-soo’s films are meditative, ordinary, commonplace affairs, static of look, unhistrionic in delivery. Boring as hell if viewed through your Marvel Cinematic Universe goggles. But look at a film like In Front of Your Face through the same eyes you use for everday life and a whole other world … Read more
Imagine that, the man who directed Mary Poppins also directed 1948’s Cold War thriller I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13. Though, when all is said and done, both are about infiltration and indoctrination when you come to think of it. One, of course, was madly successful and the other was such … Read more
We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually … Read more
Silent Dust first aired on New Year’s Eve 1965 and from a 21st-century vantage point has all the makings of a very prescient episode of The Avengers. In what starts out as an obvious parody of a nature documentary, we first observe birds nesting in the trees, then watch as the birds start dropping off … Read more
The Viola Davis “is there nothing she can’t do?” list gets a bit longer with The Woman King, an action epic with issues it wants to address, but first it wants to show us Davis, oiled up and charging into battle as the warrior commander of a deadly elite troupe of female African soldiers in … Read more