Review

Stranger than (pulp) fiction… “They fuck you up, your mum and Dad…” wrote poet Philip Larkin. But it’s the lesser-known second line, “They may not mean to, but they do…” that hangs heaviest over Crystal Moselle’s extraordinary documentary. Whichever way you cut it, this is a film about child abuse, …

What would you do if you could clone yourself? Stay in bed and let your doppelgänger endure your job for you? Become a magician and ruin Hugh Jackman’s life? Solve increasingly complex problems in a 2D puzzle platformer? You’ll have to opt for the latter playing as Filo. He’s a …

Kyle be back. “Time-travel makes my head hurt,” yells Kyle Reese, midway through the mindbending Terminator Genisys. His words are sure to be echoed by a good few viewers. With an alternate timeline wiping out most of what you know about Skynet, Sarah Connor and those deadly Terminators, this fifth …

For those not versed in the psalms of Hoxton, Dallas, Wolf and Chains, Payday 2: Crimewave Edition is far from your average shooter. Sure, it’s in first-person and you do have plenty of boomsticks to your name, but the shootouts are merely a byproduct of being an armed robber. The …

Wham, bam, thank you, Sam. Through the exclamatory prose and plumes of cigar smoke, a passion for life, people and stories blazes forth from Hollywood maverick Samuel Fuller’s autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale Of Writing, Fighting And Filmmaking. Passion begets passion here in daughter Samantha’s heartfelt tribute, where a …

We’re half way through season 5 and yet it still feels like Game of Thrones is setting up the series. Provided there’s a big pay off to this build-up then perhaps the slow start can be forgiven, but now we’re so far from book territory it’s hard to tell what …

An actor in crisis who gets locked out of his theatre in his undies? It’s Birdman, right? No, actually. Barry Levinson’s take on Philip Roth’s novel The Humbling (the film’s original title, incidentally, before this rather generic UK re-titling) sees Al Pacino play Simon Axler, a Shakespearean thesp who loses …

There’s just a pinch of The X-Files in the way that “Broken Arrow” opens: torch-flashing security guards, a mysterious, supernaturally-powered figure in the shadows and a grisly bit of blood-letting to take us into the credits (the splattered TV screen is a particularly grisly touch). Fabled creature performer Doug Jones …

For a few krona more. The western is alive and well (-referenced) in Kristian Levring’s violent horse opera, one of the most exciting cowboy movies to clip-clop onto screens in a while. Stylish, sexy, with a quick-draw narrative, it’s set in 1864 in the small town of Black Creek: a …

Lady gardening? Ooh la la… What attracts an actor to direct? It takes just one scene to discover what Alan Rickman, behind the camera for the first time since 1997’s The Winter Guest and here playing Louis XIV, saw in A Little Chaos. But any thoughts that Rickman the director …