Journey’s End

A respectful and respectable screen version of RC Sherriff’s Classic WWI story about the experiences of a company of East Surrey riflemen in the forward trenches, stoically awaiting their fate. It’s March 1918 and a long anticipated spring offensive is immanent. The action takes place over a 4 day period and culminates in a bone…

The Shape of Water

Just your average story of  girl meets fish, girl kidnaps fish, girl has sex with fish, girl releases fish back into the ocean. Can’t see what all the fuss is about. Robbie Collins suggested we think of it as The Creature from the Black Lagooon as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk, which…

Last Flag Flying

I remember Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail as one of the landmark films of the 70s. Darryl Poniscan who wrote the book on which it was based, subsequently wrote a sequel featuring the same characters embarking on another journey, and it is this that Richard Linklater has adapted here; although he has chosen to give…

Early Man

A rare misfire from Aardman studios. Hopefully this will be a temporary blip and we can look forwards to more of the lovably daft, homespun fare with which won them so many plaudits at home and abroad. In courting a family audience Nick Park has lost the trademark idiosyncrasy which used to appeal to everyone.…

Phantom Threads

Sew….. Sew…..Knit Knit Sew…is pretty much what we get in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest and wackiest offering so far. We are in the world of Haute Couture in 1950s London, where Reynolds Woodcock (a confirmed batchelor) makes frocks with his sister and business partner Cyril (nice one). Their label supplies grotesquely expensive dresses to the…

Finding Your Feet

There they were, on the end of yer legs all the time. This was a film trailed as a feel good comedy about a geriatric amateur dance troop whose collective quirky optimism sees them become minor celebrities following a viral U Tube posting. This in turn leads to an invition to perform at an international…

Hostiles

Hell there ain’t nothing quite like an elegiac western when you’ve got a hankering fer a film bout “when a man’s got ta do what a man’s got ta do”. No siree! And after what I thought was a rather unpromising beginning, Scott Cooper slowly unfolds a sombre but powerful meditation on perseverance, tolerance  and…

Ladybird

Ladybirds are strange creatures a’rnt they?  They shouldn’t be able to fly but somehow they do. Beneath their shiny decorative carapace lurks an almost unfathomable tangle of legs, wings and feelers. And they have been known to bite! They would be a perfect visual metaphor for Chrisine MacPherson (Saoirse Ronan) – an awkward teenager on…