Complaining “this film suffers from too much ambition” isn’t something you get to do very often, but it’s still a fairly easy and facile criticism. But occasionally, it just fits perfectly, and if ever I’ve seen a film that seems, objectively, to be the poster child for movies that are being pressed to do too […]

The third feature by director Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now is an extraordinarily peculiar horror film, not least because it doesn’t really act like a horror film for something like 100 of its 110 minutes. For the most part, it’s an atmospheric mystery cooking along at a low simmer, tremendously unsettling but never remotely scary. […]

It is trite by now to observe the dual facts that Happy-Go-Lucky is one of the brightest and loveliest movies of the year, and that this is a surprise; but I can’t help myself. It was after all directed by noted British misery-monger Mike Leigh, a man given to dark irony and emotional sucker-punches, and […]

How much easier life would be if one could argue in good faith that the Saw movies were being produced according to some sort of template; that except for the names these were all the same damn thing over and over again, like the Friday the 13th films. Ah, but excepting for the fact that […]