Warning: this article contains spoilers. The Oscar nominations loom, and Bennett Miller’s quiet masterpiece Foxcatcher deserves recognition. The film is a genuine “state of the nation” story, something…
Fairy tales have happy endings. They may be dark and scary but the prince always finds Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood susses out the big bad wolf. Right? All too often many assume that fairy stories…
The movie Selma takes King – best known to Americans as an orator – and turns him into an organizer.
Wikimedia Commons
It’s been almost 60 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. became a household name during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and some may find it astonishing that, until the recent release of Selma, he’s…
The violence of the Exodus is disconcerting to a modern viewer, but the ancients would not blink an eye.
21st Century Fox
Ridley Scott’s 3D biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), an interpretation of the exodus of Israelite slaves from Egypt by Moses, sparked controversy last month when it was banned in Egypt and Morocco…
Whether Bond can be black or not is a debate that has rumbled on past the pre-Christmas Sony hack revelations that Idris Elba was proposed as the next Bond. Kanye West waded in just before the new year…
Birdman is awash with in-jokes, but laugh and then forget about them. And forget about the fact that Birdman is a backstage comedy set in a crappy 800-seat theatre in New York. Because this is really a…
The story of two people who fall in love.
Universal Pictures
The Theory of Everything is a film about two people who meet at university and fall in love. But what makes it remarkable is that one of them is Professor Stephen Hawking and that when he and Jane Wilde…
“It’s not even that good a story,” quips Moses during Exodus: Gods and Kings, the latest biblical blockbuster to assault our cinema screens. I think Moses was being rather harsh on himself there; it’s…
Recently, Angelina Jolie announced her retirement from the acting profession so that she could take up writing and directing full time. Which is an error, if her latest directing endeavour Unbroken is…
Is it ever okay to depict the assassination of living person?
KCNA/Reuters
Sony’s decision to cancel the Christmas Day release of its film The Interview is drawing harsh criticism from Hollywood’s elite. George Clooney is asking everyone to stand up against the cancellation…
That poster’s all you’re gonna get.
Justin Lane/EPA
Is The Interview a good movie? We may never know. After the theft by North Korean hackers of vast quantities of confidential emails, pay information and unreleased film scripts, the drip-drip leaking of…
I’m going to kickstart something off in a minute.
PA Archive
The taxi driver was mystified by the long queue waiting to go into Leeds Picturehouse cinema on a recent Sunday afternoon. He was clearly surprised when I explained that what turned out to be a capacity…
If 2013 was the year of the selfie, then 2014 is the year of the hyper-short film. Today, people don’t just watch films in cinemas or living rooms. Instead, the term “movies” takes on a new connotation…
Soon to grace your cinema screen.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
A film about the Obamas which will dramatise their famous first date one summer afternoon in 1989 is planned. The news has unsurprisingly set tongues wagging and left some mouths agape. Is it not cheap…
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is released around the world this month. Never mind the top tens, this film will skew the box office stats for 2014 and 2015. Image: John Bell as Bain and Luke Evans as Bard. Photo: Mark Pokorny.
Warner Bros
Tis the season to make Top 10 lists. Why? Because we are hurtling with unavoidable haste toward the end of another calendar year. It’s almost impossible to get through the day without some kind of Top…
The Guardians of the Galaxy – whose protagonists are a morally-gray motley crew – could be seen as a satire of the classic hero tradition.
BagoGames/Flickr
A. David Lewis, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
A beautiful assassin. A superstrong thug. A star-lost child of the ‘80s. A sentient tree. A gun-toting raccoon. Meet the morally gray protagonists of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the film that raked…
Lord of the Rings 6.
Mark Pokorny/Warner Bros Pictures
In 1937 a fairy tale about a reluctant hero with hairy feet was published by a tweedy English academic called JRR Tolkien. The Hobbit was an instant success – and its mighty sequel The Lord of the Rings…
The latest Hunger Games film, Mockingjay – Part 1, is topping the international box office. Although it’s a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of…
There have been some strange conflicts in history. The War of Jenkins Ear, which lasted from 1739 to 1748, resulted in the death of thousands. It started when Robert Jenkins, a merchant seaman, had his…
The next James Bond film – the 24th in the series that began with Dr No in 1962 – is to be called Spectre. Although the plot remains a closely-guarded secret, the name reveals more than it lets on. Spectre…