| MovieSteve

Crime 101

2026-05-13 by Steve

Slick operators meet slick movie in Crime 101, a drama about capable people being pushed out of their comfort zones for our entertainment. It’s 21st-century film noir, to a large extent, Michael Mann in its glossiness and sexing-up of the city, utterly familiar in its set-up, less so in its payoff. Bart Layton has made two feature films before, both with a strong documentary flavour. The Imposter was a full-on doc about one guy passing himself off as another, and everyone, including the replaced guy’s mother, somehow being taken in. The other, American Animals, used documentary elements to tell the story of an elaborate real-life heist. Both were remarkable. Layton edges more obviously … Read more

Bird

2025-11-25 by Steve

What would happen if you crashed the most grounded, miserablist movie genre into the most flyaway and fantastical? Grim into Grimm. Bird is the answer, Andrea Arnold’s sixth film in 18 years. Again the great performances, again the ability to secure a name who you’d expect would be doing bigger things. Again Arnold makes us work for a redemptive moment, a shred of hope and humanity. Look at those closing credits though, Arnold’s cast dancing to Fontaines DC’s Too Real. Pure joy. Arnold is like a cat playing with a mouse. The big name is Barry Keoghan, Oscar-nominated for Saltburn, who dropped out of Gladiator II to do this. Playing skanky drug-dealing Bug, … Read more

Saltburn

2024-01-182024-01-13 by Steve

The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more

Eternals

2022-11-022022-01-29 by Steve

Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, Eternals is a Marvel superhero movie that’s sketchy, thin, never fully fleshed out. Not bad, exactly, just hard to get a bead on. Is stuff missing or was it never meant to be there? Perhaps its problems lie in the origins of the source material, an iteration of an iteration etc etc. The first of the superhero gangs was 1960’s Justice League (itself a revival of the 1940s Justice Society of America), a greatest-hits compilation of DC Comics’ big hitters – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and more. In 1963 Marvel responded to the success of the Justice League with its own version, … Read more