Before you get into the main meat of this post, you should know one thing straight up:  When I first got to the secret location of Secret Cinema last night, where the almighty behemoth of a project that is retro cinema from glory days of filmmaking and a total excuse […]

It’s 1963, and Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) studies cosmology – “like religion for intelligent atheists” – at Cambridge, looking for a single equation to explain everything, a theory about time, a space-time singularity that explains the way the universe appeared. He meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a party: she studies French […]

Translating Cheryl Strayed’s 2013 sort-of memoir Wild: From lost To Found On The Pacific West Trail to the screen must have been a daunting task for everybody involved; it really isn’t a text that seems like fertile ground for cinematic reinvention, it’s not crying out to be displayed on the […]

The first words to be heard in this film is the character of Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, asking “are you paying attention? You will listen closely and you will not judge me until I am finished.” These lines are as much directed at the audience as they are […]

The weight of expectation is interesting.  To look back over the last fifteen years and see just how far Christopher Nolan’s career has come – from shooting a low-budget thriller with his mates in London to fiddling around with $165m – is pretty incredible.  With wildly ambitious and interesting films like […]

A couple of years ago, William Friedkin went so far as to describe David Ayer’s new film as “the best cop movie ever made”.  Quite a statement, certainly, and one’s mind can’t help but immediately leap to the challengers: Die Hard, Fargo, The Departed, Serpico, Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon… the list goes on […]

I like a good thriller, I do. I normally gather plot devices quite quickly and watch for what the next turn in the story may be. I like to be fooled, however, and think highly of anything that tricks me or shocks me at the end. Apart from Lost. That […]

I won’t lie; I’m not the biggest X-men fan. It’s not that I dislike the movies, I just never really had a comic book interest to sustain my curiosity. I saw the first film and didn’t think much of it, then the third, and again, wasn’t overly impressed, finally X-men Origins: […]