Film Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Early in Hail, Caesar!, Joel and Ethan Coen's farce set at an MGM-esque movie studio in the early 1950s, the narrator (Michael Gambon) refers to the films overseen by producer/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as pieces of gossamer. It's a poignant phrase to describe the kind of shimmering popular entertainment being cranked out by the fictional Capitol Pictures, but it also feels like the Coens are lampshading how light and frivolous Hail, Caesar! feels compared to some of their other films. Much as Woody Allen ended You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger by invoking Shakespeare's line about sound and fury, or the Coens ended their own Burn After Reading by having J.K. Simmons acknowledge that the story didn't amount to much, the "gossamer" line feels like a pre-emptive apology for the film which contains it.

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: Under The Skin (2013)

Based, in the loosest possible sense of the word, on a novel by Michael Faber, Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin is a work of subterfuge, both in terms of its storytelling and its general concept. Narratively, the story is about an alien (Scarlett Johannson) who drives around Scotland looking for single, lonely men to pick up. Once she entices them into her van, and once she has ascertained that they don't have any family who will come looking for them, she takes them back to a farm where she manipulates their sexual desire to 'harvest' them. In order to maintain her disguise, she has to be believably human, something which she is able to do very easily within the confines of the van, but which becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous in almost any other context. It's a film which derives a great deal of tension and unease from placing its lead character in relatively normal situations, then seeing how her discomfort grows more and more palpable.

Film Review: Her (2013)

Like many great works of science fiction, Spike Jonze's new movie Her uses its futuristic visions to examine very contemporary and human truths. In particular, it explores our changing relationship with technology, as well as the way in which technology is changing our relationships. The former theme takes the shape of the growing friendship, then gradual attraction, between Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha, the new Operating System he has installed on his phone (voiced with equal parts naïf-like wonder and breathless sensuality by Scarlett Johansson). It says a lot about the verisimilitude of their relationship that Theodore's name is the least credible part.

Film Review: Scoop (2006)

Having decamped to London for Match Point and seemingly revitalised his creative juices, Woody Allen could easily have decided to mine the same somber thriller territory for all that it was worth. Ever driven by his distracted, digressive muse, he instead returned to doing exactly the same kind of strained comedy that he'd struggled with since 2000, the only noticeable difference being that the actors and accents had changed.

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: Hitchcock (2012)

Alfred Hitchcock has the unique distinction of being the only film-maker in history who can be readily identified by nothing more than his silhouette. Through his television interviews and the dry, morbidly funny introductions he performed at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became not just a director of iconic films, but an icon himself. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his well-crafted public persona, there is still something fascinatingly unknowable about the man, the obsessive son of a grocer who (allegedly) did everything short of torture his actresses in pursuit of realising the images in his head. There's certainly potential for a great psycho-drama about Hitchcock, or at the very least an interesting one about whether or not the themes that underpin his work - paranoia, voyeurism, a fear of authority - bled into his private life.

Film Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

When it was released in 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona was roundly hailed as one of Woody Allen's periodic returns to form. Having seemingly exhausted London as a subject/setting, he turned his restless eye to Barcelona, and used it as a setting for a story of love and the many forms that it can take. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scralett Johansson) are a pair of Americans who visit Barcelona together, though they do so for different reasons.