Films

Depending on your point of view, Marvel films are either the best or the worst thing to happen to cinema. Personally, I lean towards the latter. Some might even go so far as to say that I'd rather watch my bare feet being slowly consumed by gnawing rodents than watch most of them, but who's to say. To me they all seem formulaic to the point of abject boredom. A manifestation of what is considered art for the iPhone generation. Every release seemed to quite obviously follow th

To say this film was polarizing upon its release would be an understatement. Friendly terms such as 'the worst film ever made' began following this film around almost as soon as the first weekend's screenings were over. Fans of the comic book genre were baffled. Fans of the first film were baffled. Critics showered it with scourn. Yet among the noise there have been a select few offering their praise, notably one Quentin Tarantino whose opinion on film is respected almost acr

Alfonso Cuarón has proved himself over the years to be one of the most innovative and brilliant directors around. His work spans across many different styles, but it's hard to argue that he knows how to put a film together. If you've ever seen the car-chase sequence in 'Children of Men', or any of 'Gravity' you know he knows how to do big cinema with the best of them, as evidenced by helming probably the most beloved film in the Harry Potter series, 'The Prisoner of Azkaban'.

Before directing such crowd pleasers as 'Rocky' (1977) and 'The Karate Kid' (1984), John G. Avildsen was making his bones on the indie film circuit. He'd done a couple of not particularly noteworthy films before taking on 'Joe' in 1970. Little did he know that, despite the grim subject matter and unflinching portrayals of far right political viewpoints, this film would become a pretty significant success upon its release. It seemed to catch a wave that was bubbling at this ti

After soaring the heights with 'The French Connection' (1971) and 'The Exorcist' (1973), William Friedkin's next two efforts were considerable box office flops by comparison. This being despite the fact that one of them, 1977 classic 'Sorcerer', is one of the best films of the era. So by 1980, Friedkin found himself in the position of still being a coveted director, but his star was arguably on the decline. The fortunes of Al Pacino, on the other hand, were quite the opposite

Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, David Lean's 1962 behemoth has been described as the "epic to end all epics" and with good reason. Magnificently filmed in Panavision Super 70mm, (which basically results in a massive frame, handy when shooting the infinite abyss of the middle eastern desert) the sheer scale of this film is something to behold. The budget for extras alone must've given the studio bigwigs a mild aneurysm. Simply put, it is massive. 

The films of Alexander Payne usually feature a few things. Typically there is a male lead, somewhere in their middle ages, quite often kicked around by life and verging on full-blown curmudgeonism. Whether being played by Matthew Broderick ('Election' 1996), Bruce Dern ('Nebraska' 2013) or George Clooney ('The Descendants' 2011), there tends to be a similar protagonist at the core of most of his work. The most memorable of these characters, in my book, was Miles Raymond - por

I once heard a joke that the Irish are the only race of people who would be so light-hearted that they can name a bloody thirty-year conflict "the troubles". Most of the battles took place in the city of Belfast, a place still staunchly divided today between Irish and British nationalists and one of the major losses of the war is the slow decline of the Irish language itself. As this film points out, there are only 6,000 native Irish speakers in the whole of Northern Ireland