Film Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

When the first trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane appeared mere weeks before the film was due to come out - a shocking turn of events in an age of drip-feeding information, release dates being announced years in advance, and teasers for trailers for movies that won't come out for many months - and once it became clear that it wasn't a direct sequel to Matt Reeves' Cloverfield, the first thing I thought of, as is so often the case, was Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The third installment in the venerable horror franchise created by John Carpenter and Debra Hill is most famous for being the only one not to feature the character of Michael Myers, instead focusing on a supernatural storyline that had nothing to do with the slasher genre that defined (and was defined by) the previous films.

Film Review: Cop Car (2015)

When Cop Car debuted at the Sundance film festival back in January, it was warmly received and seen as a minor breakthrough for writer-director Jon Watts. It wasn't the sort of film that would set the world alight, but it was a smart, low-budget genre movie that was expertly handled and augured great things. Yet before it even went into general release, the film already felt like a footnote of Watts' career, since he was tapped to direct the next Spider-Man reboot not long after Cop Car played in Park City. While that doesn't have much of a bearing on the film itself, it does alter the general perception of it. What once was a sharp and neatly put together genre exercise starts to look a little too much like a calling card, or Watts' gateway to franchise filmmaking.

Film Review: Queen of Earth (2015)

There's a long stretch of Listen Up Philip, Alex Ross Perry's caustic and Rothian examination of a caustic and Rothian writer played by Jason Schwartzman, in which the film digresses from its main plot in order to focus on the life of Philip's ex-girlfriend, Ashley. The sequence is easily the best part of the film, in part because Elisabeth Moss' performance provides a nice break from the Great Male Writer dick-swinging of the rest of the film, and as a way of illustrating just how toxic it is be to share your life with the aforementioned dick-swingers. As much as I liked the rest of the film, I found myself wishing that Moss was actually the star, and that the whole film could be just about Ashley dealing with the aftermath of her relationship with Philip.

Film Review: John Wick (2014)

This does not last long.

If you want to know what kind of movie John Wick is, the following description should give you a good idea. Having been beaten up by Iosef (Alfie Allen, muscling in on Tom Felton's monopoly on playing reprehensible twerps), the snotty son of Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), a Russian gangster, and having watched as Iosef and his men stole his '69 Mustang and killed his dog - a beyond adorable beagle puppy that happened to be a gift from his dead wife - the titular former hit man and assassin (Keanu Reeves) decides to get even. He leaves his New Jersey home - but not before dispatching a dozen of Nyqvist's henchmen - and heads to New York where he checks into a hotel. Not just any hotel, though: The Continental Hotel, a hotel that caters solely to the city's society of trained killers, all of whom obey a strict code of honour put in place by its owner (Ian McShane) and enforced by his concierge (Lance Reddick). It's like the Cheers bar, except everybody knows your name because you might represent a potentially huge payday.

Film Review: Nightcrawler (2014)

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a scumbag in search of a calling. He spends his days educating himself via the Internet and his nights stealing copper wire. After a semi-successful evening - he sells his haul but is rebuffed when he applies for a job with the very people he just sold clearly stolen goods to - he spots a flaming car by the side of the road and stops to look. He sees some cameramen filming the aftermath, and learns that they sell the footage to local news stations. Inspired, he buys a camera and a police scanner (funded by stealing a high performance mountain bike) and starts his own freelance business filming crime scenes in order to sell the footage to an L.A. station run by Nina Romina (Rene Russo). Unsurprisingly given his other work, Lou goes to extreme lengths in order to get the best footage possible.

Film Review: A Most Wanted Man (2014)

John le Carré's fiction is marked by a key contrast between his methodical plotting and the sweaty desperation of his characters. The spies that populate his novels are often middle-managers trying to achieve a small victory in a conflict in which they no longer believe, and who sacrifice their chance to be a whole person in the pursuit of a greater good. They live only half a life by agreeing to look through the windows of people living their own. One of the reasons that Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains the definitive feature film adaptation of le Carré's work is that it manages to create an air of tragic inevitability, a sense that there are forces at work that will crush the characters no matter what they do, while also imbuing its characters with a faint yet potent belief that maybe they'll be the ones to escape a situation that has already claimed so many lives.

Film Review: Joe (2013)

According to Joe, the perpetually angry hero of David Gordon Green's film of the same name, restraint is the only thing keeping him alive. There's a certain wry humour in that statement, considering that these words are spoken by Nicholas Cage, an actor for whom the word seems so foreign it might as well be written in hieroglyphics, but there's also a great truth to it, both for the character and for the film that surrounds him. As played by Cage, Joe is a man who seems constantly on the verge of committing acts of terrible violence. He's introduced as the head of a crew responsible for poisoning trees so that they can be torn down and replaced, and he seems to be holding himself more or less together. Very quickly, though, it becomes apparent that his job and life are constructs designed to contain his propensity for self-destruction, which boils over in a handful of shocking, darkly comedic scenes that make good use of Cage's volatile physicality. He's not a consistently violent man, but Joe is definitely dangerous, and that sense that he could just flip out at any moment shadows him at every moment.

Film Review: Gravity (2013)

Gravity, the latest film from director Alfonso Cuarón, opens with a bravura sequence in which the camera follows the actions of a trio of astronauts as they set about repairing the Hubble telescope. In an unbroken, twenty minute take we watch as the cocky yet assured veteran Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and the jittery newcomer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) float high above the Earth, talking to each other about their mission in-between banter with Mission Control. There's a loose, convivial feel to the scene, but it's also disquieting. As the camera looks on coolly, things start to go terribly, tragically wrong. Pieces of debris hurtling around the Earth start to pepper the shuttle and telescope, causing catastrophic damage and sending Stone tumbling into the emptiness of space. With limited oxygen and their transport destroyed, it falls to Kowalski and Stone to try to make it back to Earth alive before they suffocate or get hit by the debris again.

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: Side Effects (2013)

Steven's Soderbergh's retirement from filmmaking - something which, considering his commitment to directing an entire television series next year, should probably be viewed through huge sceptical quotation marks - has had two distinct yet symbiotic consequences. Creatively, it seems to have reinvigorated him, giving an urgency to his work that suggests that he is trying to work through as many genres and styles as he can before he leaves film behind forever (again: sceptical quotation marks). When you look at the disparate films he has made since he announced he was walking away - from the throwback action of Haywire to the lurid kineticism of Magic Mike - as well as the speed at which they have been produced and released, there is a definite sense of an artist trying to get everything out of his system before it's too late.

Film Review: Mildred Pierce (1945)

Shots ring out in a beautiful, well-adorned house. In stark, Expressionistic black and white, a man falls into frame. His name is Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), and as life oozes out of him, he manages one final word: Mildred. It's the name of his new wife (played by Joan Crawford in Oscar-winning form) who is introduced in similarly bleak fashion. Depicted in luminous, shimmering monochrome, Mildred Pierce is first seen contemplating taking the proverbial long walk off a very literal short pier. She is only stopped from taking a final, fatal step by a passing police officer, who reminds her that if she does anything silly, he'll have to dive in to save her. His meaning is easily understood: selfishness ripples out and hurts people beside the perpetrator. It's a lesson Mildred knows all too well.

Film Review: Killing Them Softly (2012)

Released on the cusp of the 2012 awards season, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly was strangely, some might say cruelly, ignored by most of the mainstream awards, a fate which mirrored its failure to connect with a broad audience. Granted, it's still the most commercially successful film of Dominik's career and it did not want for critical attention, but this seems much too modest a fate for a film which, whilst flawed, is still a fascinating, often brilliant attempt to make a down-and-dirty crime thriller which doubles as a (perhaps too) pointed political commentary.

Film Review: Argo (2012)

The real-life story behind Ben Affleck's Argo is so fantastically strange that even a mediocre talent could create a solid film from it. Considering that Affleck has demonstrated with his first two directorial efforts (2007's Gone Baby Gone and 2010's The Town) that he is much more than a mediocre film-maker, it should come as no surprise that he has managed to turn a thrilling true story into a thrilling feature film. Yet in telling the story of how the CIA created a fake movie in order to help people in real danger, he comes dangerously close to out and out lying in service of the story. Whilst it seems apt, given the story, it also verges on being irresponsible.

Film Review: Lawless (2012)

When we think of Prohibition, we think of gangsters. Historically, we think of Al Capone and his ilk building empires on spilt blood and illicit liquor, whilst cinema gives us James Cagney rising to the top, then falling face down in the gutter. These are indelible, iconic images, and it's no surprise that whenever film-makers tell the story of Prohibition, they tell it through the eyes of gangsters; grandiose and tragic figures who strut around in sharp suits brandishing Tommy guns.

Film Review: Killer Joe (2011)

William Friedkin’s latest is a deeply unpleasant film about deeply unpleasant people. A tale of betrayal amongst trailers, it deals with the sort of people whose baseness comes less from a place of evil than a kind of banality bred from living somewhere where nothing ever happens. It’s a sleazy and scuzzy slice of misanthropy that sees a group of grotesques get in over their heads, and then suffer the horrific consequences of their actions. In short, it’s a Hell of a lot of fun.

Film Review: Carancho (2010)

Pablo Trapero's Carancho (The Vulture) opens with statistics about the numbers of people who are involved in fatal or near-fatal traffic accidents in Argentina. After delineating the daily, weekly and yearly figures, it ends with the wry statement that "the compensation business is booming," before introducing us to Sosa (Ricardo Darin), an ambulance-chasing lawyer who is being beaten up at the funeral of a man who has been killed in an accident, and whose family don't take kindly to Sosa showing up trying to convince them to start legal proceedings before the body is even in the ground.

Film Review: Drive (2011)

Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn’s minimalist action movie about a stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver, feels like a film out of time. Its methodical pacing, neon-soaked vision of L.A. and electronic soundtrack give it the feel of a lost Michael Mann film and it’s easy to see why the film received such a mixed response from audiences on its theatrical release. Anyone expecting Fast Five would be sorely disappointed by its lack of traditional spectacle in favour of a slow, chaste love affair between Driver and his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), broken up by scenes of startlingly brutal violence.

Film Review: Haywire (2011)

As he hurtles towards 50, the age at which he claims he will retire, or at the very least will take a prolonged break, from film-making, Steven Soderbergh seems intent on burning through as many genres as possible. The already prolific director, who has made 25 feature films in 23 years, will have released three films in the space of twelve months before this year is out, all of which are radically different. Contagion was a stark and bleak look at what could happen in the case of a cataclysmic pandemic, the forthcoming Magic Mike is a comedy about a male stripper played by Channing Tatum, and the recently-released Haywire is an action-thriller that, on the surface at least, seems pretty standard.

Film Review: John Carpenter's The Ward (2010)

Considering that John Carpenter had not made a film in nine years when he made The Ward, it doesn't really feel like he went away, primarily because his back catalogue has been so efficiently strip-mined in the intervening years. Starting with Assault on Precinct 13 in 2005, there has been a steady stream of remakes of Carpenter's seminal work from the '70s and '80s that has simultaneously burnished and cheapened his legacy as one of the great genre film-makers. Whilst some of those remakes turned out to be entertaining and functional (Assault on Precinct 13) and others wound up being dreadful, witless retreads (The Fog), none of them displayed the same sense of a personal vision that Carpenter's best work did, and his return to film-making following the utterly awful Ghosts of Mars should be cause for celebration.

Film Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film that, on a purely technical level, is hard to fault. It's beautifully shot by Tomas Alfredson, who previously directed the superb Let The Right One In, well acted by a rogue's gallery of great British acting talent and it has a wonderful sense of time and place to it. Alfredson and his crew capture a decaying Britain that is slowly suffocating under the weight of the Cold War and its own sense of increasing obsolescence. Much like the John le Carré novel upon which it is based, the film really conveys a sense that the spies and intelligence agents that populate it have seen better days and are now going through the motions, no longer certain that the war they are fighting is really worth a damn anymore. It's a Cold War thriller that is appropriately chilly.