Now that we’ve collectively agreed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened, let us return to fawning over Steven Spielberg for that kind of “gee whiz, let’s do that again!” giddiness you get from watching movies like The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. The director might be working from a collection of mid-20^th century comics by Belgian artist Hergé, but this is undeniably [...]

Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is not like most other sports movies. In most sports movies, no matter which game they concern, the drama takes place in the arena – on the basketball court and the football field, in the boxing ring and the baseball diamond. It is there that muscular athletes conquer pain, adversity and inevitably sharp odds to steal victory (or occasionally suffer honourable defeats) in front of lights, cameras, [...]

A first-class tale of political intrigue, The Ides of March offers a glimmer of hope to those people fed-up with the state of American politics, only to dash those hopes upon the jagged rocks of ambition, secrecy and betrayal. The story, based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, concerns an idealistic junior campaign manager who gets a crash course in pragmatism when he discovers the man he is [...]

Whilst adults are busy pondering the meaning of life, kids have been losing sleep over a far more pressing question: how can a single man deliver billions of presents in a single night? Well, with plenty of wit and perhaps a bit of insider knowledge, Britain’s Aardman Animations (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) have come up with a cracker of an answer: all it takes is a gigantic spaceship, an [...]

In Bill Cunningham New York, first-time director Richard Press has captured and crafted a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man, one who works and lives in the world of today, yet in many ways seems to hark back to a by-gone era.

Darting around New York like on a Schwinn bicycle and sounding every bit like Katherine Hepburn’s long lost cousin, Cunningham is the camera-wielding journalist behind two influential fashion columns in [...]

In both its non-linear structure and its astounding visual composition, Burning Man is a bit like Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life. Written and directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (Better Than Sex), the Australian drama presents a series of beautifully composed images and scenes that make up the memories from the life and marriage of it’s lead character, a cocky English chef [...]

You can officially add Na Hong-jin to the growing list of South Korean directors outdoing ninety-five percent of their Hollywood counterparts. After debuting with the critically acclaimed The Chaser in 2009, Na’s follow-up is an artful, absorbing and exceedingly violent crime thriller called The Yellow Sea, a film that bears all the style and splatter that characterizes the work of Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), Bong Joon-ho (The Host) and Kim Ji-Woon [...]

There is a moment in the middle of Midnight in Paris where Gil Penders, the films’ leading man and a hopeless romantic, muses that no work of art can equal the beauty of a great city. Just as Isaac felt about New York in Manhattan, or Vicki and Cristina felt about the Spanish capital in Vicki, Cristina, Barcelona, Gil is enamoured with the great French city from whence this film [...]