Tweet      Safe House – (Richard Pearson overseen by Daniel Espinosa) Nobody does Denzel better than Denzel does Denzel. Unfortunately Denzel nowadays only ever does Denzel: result – too much Denzel. Yes Denzel lady fans: hard to believe, but it’s true. The only way to access the considerable talent of this fine screen actor, it seems to me, […]

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Tweet      The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – JohnMadden If I were an artist I would want to paint her; I wish I were a better poet that she might read one of my poems; and if my life-long ambition, which will not now be fulfilled, to Direct a movie came true – I […]

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Tweet      Rampart – Oren Moverman When did the Hollywood Dream factory re-tool to produce nightmares? Was there a key year; a definitive film? I always feel the repressed misogyny in largely male directed movies finally crossed a borderline with Brian de Palma’s 1980 Dressed To Kill: the first film I remember where I was, […]

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Tweet      Man On A Ledge – Asgar Leth Workmanlike thriller with a central device that generates tension at first then gradually suffers from the law of diminishing dramatic returns. Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is an ex-cop jailed for stealing a legendary diamond from ruthless tycoon David Englander (Ed Harris). Claiming he was framed, […]

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Tweet      Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Stephen Daldry   Danny Leigh on Film 2012 about 11 year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), central character of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC): “gratingly precocious..hyper-verbal….bag of neuroses….a monster…etc”. Philip French (Guardian) on the same film: “reveals itself as a hollow, calculated, manipulative film. It uses the events of 9/11 […]

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Tweet      Woman In The Fifth -Pawel Pawlikowski Editing is the grammar of movies; their syntax and their punctuation. It renders the images and sequences accessible to us, influencing their meaning and determining the dramatic tone and pace of the film, its narrative and our reaction to both. Parallels with writing are clear: how […]

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Tweet        Casablanca – Michael Curtiz (1942) If you haven’t seen Casablanca in the cinema, on a big screen – you haven’t really ever seen it. Critics and people who write about movies because they love them can analyse the difference this makes in rational terms but the power great films like this, and it […]

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Tweet    For Valentine’s Day     Before Sunrise and it’s companion piece Before Sunset were recently voted 3rd most romantic films of all time. I’d have moved them up one slot. Amidst the commoditisation and trivialisation of romance and love that Valentine’s day largely represents – this is offered a snippet of dialogue that […]

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Tweet   Carnage – Roman Polanski Why? – must be the first question that comes to mind when adapting a work from another medium to film. The most obvious answer is the commercial hedge it represents to take a work with a proven track record of success. French dramatist Yasmina Reza’s play Le Dieu du Carnage was […]

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Tweet          The Descendants – AlexanderPayne I have laughed as the world ends in a ballet of atomic explosions to the voice of Vera Lynn; at a Knight struggling to fight back having lost both arms, gushing blood, undeterred even when his legs are the next to go; even God help me, once, […]

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