★★★1/2 When Hollywood isn’t desperately foisting him upon us as the next big star and he isn’t headlining some huge commercial flop, Ryan Reynolds intermittently tries his hand at some serious thesping, and when he does, he tends to pick very original, offbeat disturbing material. Clearly, the ex-Mr Alanis Morissette is trying to tell us there’s more to him than just a pretty face.
The director on the most macabre and joyously twisted film of 2014.
★★★ A swinging sixties female corrective to the wave of ‘Angry Young Men’ films that began almost a decade earlier.
★★★ Sidney Lumet was best known for his classic,1957 courtroom drama,12 Angry Men, an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s play, which earned three Academy Award nominations and set the stage for Lumet continuing to adapt great works of theatre throughout the sixties.
★★★ It occurred to me while watching Caught, Max Opuls’ 1948 noir psycho-drama, that had he been making films today, they might have looked something like the recently released Grace of Monaco, as Caught’s gilded cage scenario shares many style and story elements with the soured fairy tale biopic of Grace Kelly.
★★★ Both of its time and ahead of it, thanks to Olive Films, The Lost Moment can be found once more.
★★★ Characters in Brian McGuire’s films are inappropriate, resentful and unduly hostile. Varying degrees of asshole across the board. They’re also sexually deprived, dysfunctional and obsessed; perverts one at all.
I spoke to Brian Cox about playing such a revered real life figure, his own memories of the Munich crash and why inspirational family films like Believe are so important.
★★★ A brooding tonic for the current saturation of on-screen bromances.
If there’s any justice, Phoebe Waller-Bridge will be the next Richard Ayoade or Lena Dunham.
Timothy E. RAW 