Film Review: The World's End (2013)

They say that school days are the best days of your life. It's a lovely thought, especially since it conjures up images of youthful exuberance untainted by the responsibilities of adulthood, but also an insidious one. After all, for school days to be the best days of your life, everything afterwards has to be all downhill. All the excitement, joy and promise has to fizzle out into nothing, leaving only fond memories of a future that never came to pass. Gary King (Simon Pegg) not only sees school as the peak of his life, but one night in particular. Back in June of 1990, he and his friends Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman) and Pete (Eddie Marsan) embarked on an epic pub crawl through their home town of Newton Haven. They had intended to drink in all twelve drinking establishment along the fabled Golden Mile, but ultimately they failed. Regardless, it was the best night of Gary's life, and everything since then has been a sad, sorry decline.

Film Review: Mud (2012)

Few directors capture the Midwest as beautifully and poignantly as Jeff Nichols, and almost none of them do so with the same subtlety. His films are about a great many things - the bonds of family, the difficulty of surviving on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, what it means to be a man - but he weaves these themes into stories that are so compelling that they never feel laboured or complex for complexity's sake. His films are densely layered, yet they also feel guileless. This is especially true of his third film, Mud, which might seem minor in comparison to the apocalyptic menace of his previous film, Take Shelter, but is no less powerful for its smaller scale.

Review: Clear History (2013)

Nathan Flomm (Larry David) is a marketing executive who sells his shares in an electric car company that is on the verge of going public, then becomes a laughing stock when the company enjoys huge success. To hide from the hordes of people who mock him for losing out on billions of dollars, he moves from California to Martha's Vineyard and changes his name to Rolly DaVore. He manages to build a quiet life over the next decade, working as a carer for an elderly woman and generally being a pillar of the community, but his tranquillity is shattered when his former business partner Will Haney (Jon Hamm) arrives on the island with his new wife Rhonda (Kate Hudson). Rolly very quickly decides that this is the perfect opportunity to wreak vengeance on the man who cost him a fortune.

Film Review: Match Point (2005)

After a five year run of comedies which were received indifferently by both critics and audiences, and more often than not deserving that reception, Woody Allen returned to favour in a pretty big way with Match Point, which not only became his most successful film for the better part of two decades, but received rave reviews and landed Allen an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, his first since 1998. It's not hard to see why it garnered so much attention since it represented such major departure for him; it was his first primarily dramatic film in years, the first film he had shot entirely outside of the United States since Love and Death and his first thriller, although it doesn't initially appear to be one.

Film Review: The Wolverine (2013)

One of the interesting things about the X-Men films is that, even though the series now spans more than a decade and encompasses half a dozen films, the series has avoided becoming too bogged down in its own storytelling. Each film in the original trilogy might have built upon the one that went before, but they were largely self-contained stories. This was also the case with the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the half-decent X-Men: First Class, both of which played on the established characters without feeling like they were just pieces of a puzzle in the way that some of the Avengers-related films could. The sixth film in the series, The Wolverine, is the first to exhibit symptoms of being merely an element of a larger story, rather than a story actually worth telling in its own right.