With these reviews, I’ve never been able to keep up with all the films I actually watch and - inevitably - I have to write a bloated catch-up post. At the beginning of 2019 I had the genius idea of doing this at the end of every month; writing brief capsule reviews of the films I didn’t have the chance to take a full look at. I didn’t watch so many films in January, so I didn’t have to put this plan into action. However, this month I haven’t been able to stop watching films. As a result, despite squeezing out reviews of Vice and Glass , there are still five films I haven’t covered. That is, until now… Can You Ever Forgive Me? Marielle Heller’s second feature is another inexcusable Oscar snub directed by a woman. Despite Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant receiving worthy nominations for their performances, neither the Best Picture nor the Best Director categories paid any attention. Just like Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace ...

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...

Last post , I had a look at numbers twenty to eleven of my favourite films of 2018. Therefore, it stands to reason that in this post I shall take a look at numbers ten to one of my favourite films of 2018. So, let's do that. 10. Avengers: Infinity War The premise of Avengers: Infinity War is so inherently ambitious that you can forgive any of its flaws due to the fact that they pulled it off at all. Superhero films have a storied history of collapsing under the weight of an overstuffed cast; just look back at the infamous Spider-Man 3 and Amazing Spider-Man 2 or even the Avengers’ own Age of Ultron . Infinity War succeeds where those films have failed thanks to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s remarkably efficient screenplay and the Russo brothers’ emotionally detailed direction. The character development is embedded ingeniously into the narrative, as the situations the heroes (and the villains) are placed in directly challenge them and flesh them out. All of...

If I were to continue the 'years as sequels’ conceit I began in 2017 (“the messier, uglier sequel to 2016”) then 2018 fits quite snugly into the mould of the 'terrible third instalment’. Like The Matrix Revolutions or Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey? 2018 took what you thought couldn't get any worse and somehow proved you resoundingly wrong. 2018 was just a miserably aimless year, as the distance from the dreadful decisions made in 2016 increased further and the reasons for making them became even less clear. Fortunately, whilst the real world repeatedly let us down, the film world did not. I mean, we even got a good Transformers film! Hopefully, much like Bumblebee , 2019 will be the much-needed reboot that reverses our seemingly perpetual descent into despair, but right now I can't think of anything better to do than to look back on some of the best films 2018 had to offer. According to me.  Honourable Mentions  Firstly, here are a handful of films I ...

The decision to forgo a Christmas special in favour of a New Year's Day special has been met with predictable controversy. I understand, especially for those whose Christmas routine has always involved Doctor Who , but at the same time, I think it's probably for the best. The Christmas Special was becoming increasingly restrictive and, whilst none of Capaldi's Christmas episodes were completely rubbish, not all of them were the most memorable. Plus, as much as I enjoyed Nick Frost's Santa, bringing in Father Christmas himself was a sign that perhaps they were struggling for ideas. So, moving the special to the New Year seems like a good idea to me. It opens up many new narrative and thematic possibilities. Plus, the iconography surrounding New Year's is a lot vaguer than Christmas, so they can probably justify most ideas as being somewhat related.  So, how does Resolution utilise the festival? Well, for a lot of the episode it's largely just set dressing. ...

Sorry to Bother You , the directorial debut of The Coup frontman Boots Riley, is part of a growing trend of Afro-surrealism in film and television. Donald Glover's brilliant Atlanta series has dabbled in surreal comedy and last year's Get Out saw Jordan Peele take advantage of the style's horror potential. Whilst this could be seen as an effort to escape reality, most of these artists have actually utilised surrealism as a means of better understanding it. Let's face it, it's futile trying to understand the current state of the world through logic and rationalism. Sorry to Bother You is easily the most absurd yet, blending both comedy and horror to evoke the unsettling mixture of hilarity and dread regularly brought on by a glance at the day's news. It's also a brutal and uncompromising evisceration of capitalism and its insidious ability to corrupt those rewarded by it. Lakeith Stanfield's protagonist Cassius Green ('cash is green’) is present...