M. Night Shyamalan is currently Hollywood’s most infuriating director. Not because he always makes dreadful films, but because he sometimes makes good films. I really like his first four efforts (yes, even The Village ) but the man is also responsible for two of my least favourite films of all time. His borderline sacrilege adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Will Smith's nepotism vehicle After Earth are cinematic atrocities bad enough to kill most filmmakers’ careers. Yet Shyamalan keeps making films and I keep hoping he'll produce something as good as The Sixth Sense , Signs or - if we're so lucky - Unbreakable . I love Unbreakable . Despite being a superhero film, Shyamalan’s second feature bears little resemblance to the genre as we know it today. Unbreakable is a gradually paced exercise in atmosphere, deconstructing comic book conventions from a perspective unburdened by the need for action and spectacle. Unbreakable is smart and meditative; it’s engagin...

You don’t need me to tell you that American politics are currently a trainwreck. With Donald Trump in the White House, America’s ills are all flamboyantly on display for the world to laugh and despair at. However, Vice - the latest film from The Big Short director Adam McKay - makes the case that America has always been like this. By tracking the career of former Vice President Dick Cheney, McKay argues that the problems people like Trump embody have always been there, we just haven’t been paying attention. The result is an uneven but ambitious film bolstered by its wild creativity and grave relevance. Vice is a scattershot film by design. Despite an overall linearity, the narrative leaps around Cheney’s life with a playful relationship to chronology. Vice doesn't rearrange time as smoothly as similarly edited films (for example, Lynne Ramsay's fractured masterpiece We Need to Talk About Kevin ). This is largely down to the eclectic filmmaking and the restless ambition f...