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I t’s the job of a critic, in my humble opinion, to meet every film on its own terms, and evaluate it accordingly. While some dedicated keyboard warriors may claim critics are predisposed to negativity – particularly regarding comic book movies – I’m always hopeful, when I settle down in my cinema seat, that the film I watch will be good. Life is short, frequently difficult, and I don’t like to waste my time. For this reason, I’m frequently disheartened that studios seem perfectly happy to waste it for me. Anyway, The Flash. To say he’s the fastest man alive, Barry Allen’s big screen outing has taken a curiously long time to come together. First floated in 2014 and then plagued by delays , drop-outs , studio turmoil and star Ezra Miller’s various criminal exploits , the film seemed to be suffering from the same curse that has haunted DC’s cinematic slate since The Suicide Squad . Though, unlike some of its siblings , at least The Flash has made it out of the DC vault – eventually d...

R obin Hardy’s 1973 folk horror flick The Wicker Man has become legendary for many things: its unbearable building of tension, fearlessly strange content, eerie soundtrack, and petrifying conclusion. It also challenged a preconceived notion that true horror only exists in the dark of night – practically everything happens under bright, unwavering sunlight. Daylight horror has lived on ever since, from 28 Days Later to newer additions to the horror canon like Midsommar . While there are many reasons The Wicker Man has endured for the last 50 years, the extraordinary performance of Edward Woodward as Sergeant Neil Howie stands above the rest. We first see Howie in a seaplane, on his way from the mainland to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle. This journey over the picturesque island would be an opportunity to relax for most, but Howie’s eyes are pointed straight ahead, with the stern gaze of a man on a mission. That’s true in a literal sense – Howie is coming to Summerisle to fo...

I f you’ve ever watched that clip of Aragorn opening the doors in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and found it altered your brain chemistry, you’re definitely not alone. Who knew something as mundane as entering a room could be quite so…overwhelming? I have been crushing on Aragorn as far back as I can remember. Even now, over 20 years after The Fellowship of the Ring introduced him in all his chivalrous, tender glory, I silently thank Peter Jackson for casting Viggo Mortensen every time I rewatch the trilogy. With the exception of the year I wanted to be an elf, crushing on Aragorn was one of the most defining parts of my formative years. It would also be fair to say that fancying the Aragorns and Will Turners of the big screen very much shaped my ‘type’ as an adult, and I’m not the only one. The viral childhood-crush-vs-current-boyfriend TikTok trend (remember these videos here , here and here ?) proves just how strong the link between our past crushes and current type is...

I t was in the pages of the then-young Cahiers Du Cinéma magazine that a tight-knit group of French movie dorks (Truffaut, Rivette, Godard et al) first proffered Auteur Theory, the notion that a director’s authorial stamp was surely the most vital metric in determining a film’s value. Amongst their idols, few were as imposing as American director Howard Hawks. The grand old man himself was, by contrast, ruggedly anti-intellectual. “I’m a storyteller”, he would assert, “I’m not an artist.” But Hawks’ auteur credibility has always rested on his narrative sensibilities – a Hawksian close-up would be hard to define but a Hawksian situation is unmistakable. A situation like, say, the one in Only Angels Have Wings: a group of daring flyboys in a South American port town. The guys work hard, they play hard. It’s a boys’ club, and into it walks Jean Arthur as wise-cracking piano player Bonnie – the archetypal Hawksian Woman. Film critic Naomi Wise, who coined the term Hawksian Woman in 1971...

T he scientist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Stephen Williams’ biopic of Joseph Bologne, the son of an enslaved black woman and a white plantation owner, presents his talent akin to Mozart, who so impressed Marie Antoinette she knighted him Chevalier de Saint Georges. His story is tragic on two levels; first, with regard to the gilded cage that Bologne was trapped in and the deliberate steps to undermine his talents and erase his legacy; but secondly, in considering that all the music and art that we will never get to see or hear as brilliant minds toil and expire due to the systemic injustice of this hell-hole we call planet Earth. Having said that, Chevalier is also pretty fun. The costuming is gorgeous. The camera work possesses a dynamic musicality fitting of its subject. Supporting turns ...

T here’s been a lot of nervous chatter lately about the prospect of artists and artisans being usurped by the scourge of Artificial Intelligence. And rightly so, as there are people with a lot of money who, inevitably, are looking to make even more money, and AI offers an intriguing (albeit highly cynical) case for human cutbacks and significant top-line savings. Why have a human person made of flesh, blood and synapses, who can push back on suggested changes, use words that don’t connect with the intended demographic, assert their authority and jostle for more cash, when you can just sit back, spark up a stogie and hit F10? In the face of creative genocide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should neither be making nor seeing movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. And by that I mean, films that, per the closing credit roll, were crafted by huge numbers of actual real people, but in every aspect feel like they’ve been made as the result of digital automation and car...

B est known for his complex, melodic film scores, the work of composer and musician Emile Mosseri has lifted the drama of a number of films into something almost spiritual – take Minari , Lee Isaac Chung’s story of Korean diaspora in rural America. The same can be said of one of his earliest film scores, The Last Black Man in San Francisco , a film directed by Joe Talbot. That collaboration changed the way they think about filmmaking and music respectively, and since then they have become close friends and creative partners. They’ve collaborated again on a music video for “ Greedy Heart ”, a song from Mosseri’s new album, Heaven Hunters – his first studio album as a solo artist, full of vulnerable introspection (the music video is Talbot’s second, after Adele’s “ I Drink Wine “). We facilitated a discussion with the two about what they learned from each other, chasing down a strange altered song discovered on Limewire, and taking dips in LA ponds. Reductively speaking, I suppose yo...