I fully expect this film to be in my top 5 by the end of the year. The Handmaiden is maestro Park Chan-Wook’s adaptation of Sarah Water’s The Fingersmith. The action is relocated from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea – though ...

‘Yeah, I fight like a girl,’ says a defiant Isabela Moner in a trailer for the new Transformers film. And this irks me. Not because I am a misogynist simmering with rage at the slightest suggestion that feminism has infiltrated ...

This adaptation was never going to get an easy ride from me. Ghost in the Shell (2017) is based on one of my favourite manga and anime series, in particular the 1995 film of the same name. The production has ...

Film criticism has no impact on the performance of movies. I say this now so my comments about Beauty and the Beast are not misconstrued as some futile attempt to slay Disney’s latest unstoppable juggernaut. As much as any film ...

This is going to be a really difficult one to cover. Elle is a fantastic comedy-drama and it’s about rape. I must rush to clarify that this film in no way trivialises the issue. The humour is directed at the ...

I don’t say this lightly, but this here is some racist bullshit. Some may balk at that statement because Viceroy’s House is inflected with all the syrupy goodwill of a particularly saccharine episode of Downton Abbey or because the director ...

Cinema should be something incredible to behold. An astounding and revelatory experience that expands what you thought was possible. I can safely say that Kong: Skull Island is just that. I still struggle to conceive how a film so garbled, ...

The winner of the Best Picture Oscar is almost never the best film of the year. Hell, sometimes it isn’t even the best nominee. The winner gets there for a variety of reasons: campaigning by the film-makers, appealing to the ...

Just about anyone with a modicum of public influence will have a biopic made about them these days. This is a blessing and curse. It can be interesting and informative to get a view into slightly more obscure fields. The ...

When a based-on-true-events film comes out, there is a problem assessing its qualities when one has no knowledge of the subject material. Hidden Figures chronicles the involvement of black women in the NASA space programme during the Project Mercury rocket ...