Review-Lite: Greenland (2021)

Morena Baccarin and Gerard Butler in Greenland Up until recently the true disaster movie, the one where the whole world was in jeopardy and there was very little anyone could do about it was a series of features monopolised by filmmaker Roland Emmerich, especially in the 90s and early 2000s and while in recent years …

Review-Lite: The Dig (2021)

Carey Mulligan in The Dig The Dig, the Netflix produced drama about the Sutton Hoo archaeological dig site and the unsung heroes of the find comes at a time when prestige dramas aren't so much missing from our screens but come with a weighty rental fee, let alone the opportunity to buy the film outright. …

Review: Malcolm & Marie (2021) – Air Your Grievances

Zendaya and John David Washington in Malcolm & Marie Plenty has been said about Malcolm & Marie and its inception, with director Sam Levinson (Euphoria) bringing together the talents of frequent collaborator Zendaya and BlacKkKlansman lead John David Washington and a crew of 22 people to pull off arguably the first major Covid secure production. …

Small Axe – A Past Not Past

Letitia Wright in Mangrove Coming late to the party and choosing to binge all of Steve McQueen's Small Axe series of films in one week in early January it was impossible not to notice how wildly different each story told here was from the other. While sometimes it made the experience as a whole inconsistent, …

Review-Lite: Crack – Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy Documentary filmmaking is at its core a discussion or debate of an issue, a look past the blurb of an issue and getting to the core of it. Director Stanley Nelson's Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy is a look behind the decades old stigmas associated with the advent of the …

Review: Pieces of A Woman (2021) – The Distance Between Us

Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of A Woman Losing a child is an unimaginable hurt, a constantly lingering harm that disconnects the unfortunate parents that suffer that loss from everybody else. It isn't unimaginable that it could happen, more that we cannot perceive the pain as being ever present and debilitating, something for which moving on …

Review-lite: Outside The Wire (2020)

Damson Idris and Anthony Mackie in Outside The Wire Cast your mind back to January last year. Nothing had shut down and it was looking like a new year with new possibilities. While the Oscar race heated up and UK cinema at least was starting to release prestige films, Netflix was using the time to …

The Power of Perception in Saint Frances

Ramona Edith Williams and Kelly O'Sullivan in Saint Frances 2020's Indie darling Saint Frances is a film that only comes along once in a while. Prescient of the time its being made and what it wants to convey, Director Alex Thompson's film, working off a script by Kelly O'Sullivan is utterly charming and quiet but …

Review-Lite: I’m Your Woman (2020)

Rachel Brosnahan in I'm Your Woman As you might have read in my top 25 films of the year list, I'm Your Woman is a genre defying thriller that uses its noir roots to tell a female driven tale in the same style as classic detective mysteries like The Maltese Falcon and more specifically Gaslight. …

Review-Lite: The Babysitter – Killer Queen (2020)

Judah Lewis in The Babysitter: Killer Queen Nobody expected The Babysitter to be entertaining, let alone funny but director McG's 2017 film was everything people didn't expect. It was charming, bloody, funny and ultimately a smart piece of horror comedy. His follow up to the series, a continuation of Cole's (Judah Lewis) story involving crazed …