I can’t be the only person to think there are shades of Roald Dahl’s Matilda in The Girl with All the Gifts. Precocious child with unique abilities aids her idolised teacher in a world otherwise populated by hostile adults. The ...

Fair warning: as a non-committal leftie who is never going to be able to live up to the utopian ideals I espouse and is deeply guilt-ridden over my compromised stance within the capitalist web of corruption that we currently call ...

Considering most children’s films are saccharine explosions of gaudiness rendered in bargain basement 3D animation with glib, feel-good pop music for soundtracks, it’s nice to see a children’s film with a sense of craft about it. Kubo and the Two ...

Is the modern Texan western a genre now? I can’t help feeling that since No Country for Old Men, we’ve seen a number of imitators or people following that tradition. In this case, the ‘state of Texas’ seems to be ...

Woody Allen is renowned, prolific and inconsistent. He’s been making a minimum of two films a year since the 1970s. Everyone remembers his greats. His flops produce grimaces but tend to be forgotten in the unrelenting stream of his productions. ...

Europe is to be carved up anew in the wake of World War I. Relocated to France with his American diplomat father and his European mother for the duration of the negotiations, Prescott is a troubled boy. Growing up amid ...

The lives of international arms dealers must be formulaic. By the end of the nominally ‘based on true events’ War Dogs, I was struck by just how neatly the protagonists’ lives had dovetailed into a screenplay template. The fact that ...

One has to feel sorry for Pixar. With so many treasured classics in their relatively recent back catalogue, the pressure to continue to perform must be terrible. No matter how otherwise laudable an effort, so often all one can do ...

Thank god we live in an age of digital film distribution because if Jason Bourne had come out in an earlier age, it would have been a horrific waste of celluloid. In the annals of unnecessary sequels, this probably won’t ...

As a dedicated Roald Dahl fan, I was always going to hold Spielberg to a high standard with his latest outing: an adaptation of The BFG. There’s a very mixed and sprawling track record of film adaptations of Dahl but ...