Hollywood films that depict American history deeply influence our sense of national identity. Films that portray Civil Rights and Black Freedom history are particularly important. Beyond entertaining moviegoers…
The Imitation Game has scooped up eight Oscar nominations this year, including the coveted Best Picture. Since its release in autumn 2014 the film has attracted widespread positive critical appraisal and…
This year’s Oscar nominations quickly prompted ire from all quarters. This isn’t unusual, the awards are an easy target. “Everything is awful”, moans the Telegraph: “The Lego Movie, the most successful…
With Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus in the news for the film’s straight-to-Vimeo release, and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight currently in production (see Samuel L. Jackson’s Camera+ page for…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…