Before discussing Hacks season five, I would like to give some context into my relationship with the show. Hacks premiered in 2021 as one of the first highly acclaimed MAX (Known as HBO Max at the time) series. Having started watching the show at the time, it became one of …
A Michael Jackson movie was always going to be riddled with curiosity. With a life and story as extensive as the late singer’s, it certainly was not going to appease everyone. Director Antoine Fuqua was saddled with a difficult task in Michael. How far can he go into the man’s …
The unhappy true story on which Forsaken is based is one of the most traumatising situations in modern French history. It brought together several of the most hot-button issues of the modern era – freedom of speech and how the state handles issues of religion in a legally secular society …
The work of Gerard Butler has been interesting to watch unfold. While he is not the most versatile performer, Butler carved a niche. He has existed as an action star akin to someone like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Known for films like 300 or the Has Fallen series, one …
Who could have imagined that the choice of name for a baby born in 1995 in London to Kosovo Albanian parents would prove to have a global influence? The baby grew up with a short, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce name with an adorable meaning: ‘love.’ The unusual …
The choice to film in black and white is the wrong one for historical dramas. It signifies to a modern audience that this story is happening in ye olden days and therefore none of the historical nuances matter, because we are watching the distant and irrelevant past. Thanks to an …
Someday a movie featuring an argument about Predator vs Hobbit fanfiction will deserve a negative review, but today is not that day. The Incomer is completely deranged (complimentary), and its derangement is entirely character-based, giving the actors the freedom to go as wild as possible, which they did. It’s a …
Independent Nigerian cinema is so rare that it’s automatically worth a look, but nothing gets a pass based on its cultural background alone. Whether a story is set in Liverpool, Los Angeles or Lagos it needs to be viewed within the same critical framework, and if a concept is offensive …
Hot Water pulls off a very neat trick in the guise of a road movie: it makes thought process form. The act of driving thousands of miles is what provides the mother and son at the heart of this story huge catharsis without a great deal of big stuff happening. …
The concept of Run Amok is alarmingly close to bad taste. The execution of the concept of Run Amok also requires all the adults here to be really bad at adulting, which is unlikely. But if you can get past both of those things – a pretty large if – …
The world of Peaky Blinders has become a vast achievement in streaming content. Debuting from the BBC and then moving to Netflix in 2014, the show became a landmark property for the streaming service. After six seasons, no one expected Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to even happen. For diehard …
Actors Will Poulter and Noah Centineo, who both also helped produce Union County, undoubtedly personally enabled this cinema-verité story of rural American drug addiction to get made. Large parts of Union County were filmed in a real drug court with the court’s workers and the court’s service users playing all …
During the Berlinale I swung by photography museum C|O Berlin to look at their exhibit of work by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (running until June 2026, and recommended). Her most famous photograph, “Mujer Ángel, Sonoran Desert, 1979,” shows an indigenous woman in traditional dress on the side of a hill, …
Becoming one of the latest actors to jump into the director’s chair, James McAvoy takes on a semi-true tale of music business bravado and bluster in California Schemin’. The title card sets the tone, cheekily saying its source material is a “true lie”. California Schemin’ follows two budding rappers, Gavin …
Welcome back to 1980s Rutshire where a small community of upper-class folk spend their lives sleeping with people who are not their wives, trying to steal the jobs of their romantic rivals and generally tear each other down. Based on characters created by the late Jilly Cooper, the gang are …
It’s fascinating to see how many cultures in all different parts of the world come to the same conclusion for all their different problems: it’s a woman to blame. The first movie from Chad to ever play the Berlinale, Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars is a fascinating picture of …
Life rarely works out the way you want, whether or not you get what you want. The Christophers uses the art of painting as its metaphor for how people come to terms with what life has given them, and also what they do about it. It’s set entirely within London’s …
First we must congratulate Laura Caselli, the casting director for Two Pianos, for realising the male movie star currently working in France whose vibe best matches Charlotte Rampling’s is François Civil. He has a tendency to play hotheaded romantic heroes and recently carried the two-part adaption of The Three Musketeers …
The first The Devil Wears Prada, based on a novel published in 2003, was released in 2006. It was the usual coming of age story in what remains a very unusual context for women: the world of work. An aspiring journalist named Andy (Anne Hathaway) became the second assistant to …
If you thought that David Mackenzie’s previous film, Relay, was stupid, you haven’t seen anything yet. In his latest disaster, Fuze, Mackenzie, and screenwriter Ben Hopkins somehow screw up a tried-and-true pressure-cooker that should elicit strong popcorn thrills and not total bewilderment. However, instead of sticking to the film’s original …