2023 End of Year Retrospective

This has been a pretty weird year for films on the whole. In between the WGA and SAG strikes, delays of films, the rise of AI, some of the most hyped and biggest budget films of the year underperforming, this has been a pretty precarious year for film. At the same time though, there have…

Wonka Review

When it was first announced that Warner Bros were going to be making an origin story film for Willy Wonka, I had absolutely no hopes for it. Given the other studios making Roald Dahl adaptations, mainly Netflix, it felt to me like a cynical cash grab by Warner Bros to retain the rights to the…

Wish Review

Given that this is the 100th anniversary of Disney being set up, this has not been the best year for them. They’ve had quite a few high profile box office disappointments and there’s still ongoing issues from the changes in leadership at the company. That said, it is still an impressive feat for a studio…

Killers of the Flower Moon Review

It feels like the streaming era has been really good to Martin Scorsese. No matter how many bad things can be said about streamers, they have been giving Scorsese the budget and resources to make the large scale epic films he wants to make. I really liked The Irishman when that came out and now…

London Film Festival 2023: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget Review

So we’ve now come to the final film I saw at this years London Film Festival, and it’s one that I didn’t actually see in London. Something that the BFI has been doing since 2020 is allowing other cinemas across the country to show films as part of the London Film Festival. One of those…

London Film Festival 2023: Fancy Dance Review

So I’ve now come to the last film I’ve seen in London as part of the film festival. Whilst I didn’t go to the screenings of Killers of the Flower Moon, when I saw this film on the schedule I thought it would be good to still see something with Lily Gladstone in it. I…

London Film Festival 2023: The Killer Review

It’s been a bit of a shame that I’ve not been able to see a new David Fincher project in the cinema since Gone Girl. His back catalogue is one of the most impressive of any filmmaker to come up in the past 30 years and, even when his films don’t 100% land for me,…

London Film Festival 2023: May December Review

Todd Haynes is one of those directors whose back catalogue I really need to get more familiar with. I’ve seen his more recent films, really enjoying Carol and Wonderstruck, but his earlier films like Velvet Goldmine and Safe are ones I haven’t seen yet. I do know that Haynes is great at doing melodrama and…

London Film Festival 2023: Stopmotion Review

I have made it very clear in the past that I am a fan of stop motion animation. Whilst I will always have a love of the lighter side of it represented by Aardman, which will be focused on in a later review I’ll be doing for films I’ve seen at this festival, when stop…

London Film Festival 2023: Swan Song Review

Documentaries are the types of films that I rarely end up seeing in the cinema. That’s nothing to do with my thoughts on them, I think that they can represent some of the best filmmaking you can see, and more to do with them not getting wide cinema releases. In quite a lot of cases,…