Film Review: Spotlight (2015)

"If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one."

That line, spoken by Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer representing victims of sexual abuse, cuts to the heart of Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, a calm and concise celebration of calm and concise journalism. In recreating the story of how Spotlight, an autonomous investigative unit within the Boston Globe, reported on the cover-up which allowed Catholic priests to sexually abuse thousands of children over several decades, McCarthy's film is as much a portrait of a city in thrall to the Church as it is a dramatisation of the investigation itself. Like Alan Pakula's All The President's Men, Spotlight is a story of reporters trying to break a story that everyone else already seems to know about, and facing opposition from every strata of Boston society in the process.

Film Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

When Joss Whedon's first Avengers film landed in 2012, it was the end result of several years of calculated, but very real, risks. Marvel had embarked on a seemingly foolhardy quest to create a cinematic version of their comic universe, one in which dozens of superheroes existed simultaneously, had their own solo adventures, then teamed up when needed. It paid off in a huge way, not merely because The Avengers became a massive hit, but because all the subsequent Marvel films that followed were given a boost as well, and formerly marginalised characters like Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and especially Captain America (Chris Evans) are now pretty much household names. Yet success has boxed the series into a corner.

Film Review: Foxcatcher (2014)

If Foxcatcher wasn't based on real events, it'd work great as an inventive restaging of Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. Like the earlier film, Foxcatcher deals with the increasingly strained relationship between a young man (in this case Channing Tatum) and an older patron (Steve Carell) which sees the former being more or less confined to the home of the latter in pursuit of shared glory. Swap out screenwriting for Olympic wrestling and the stories match up so well that you could imagine Wilder and Charles Brackett manipulating the real-life figures behind the scenes.

Film Review: Begin Again (2013)

Writer-director John Carney had a surprise hit in 2007 with his lovely, lo-fi romance Once, in which a man and a woman (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) fall in love while composing music together. It was a thoroughly charming and winning story - one that was given extra resonance when the two leads fell in love in real life and toured together as The Swell Season - that felt like a scruffy, raw debut album, the kind that people fall madly in love to. If Once was Carney's "Funeral", then Begin Again is his "Neon Bible"; a slicker, more polished sophomore effort that has much the same romanticism that its predecessor had, but lacks that sense of intimacy.