Film Words

With most of the world still doggedly riding the wave of retro nostalgia, an interesting question to ask is how much you can strip away from the generic Stranger Things- esque formula while still making something interesting. What are the minimum requirements for an 80s/50s/whatever mood-piece where a bunch of tech nerd kids discover a world beyond their small piece of Americana? First time director Andrew Patterson reckons you can lose quite a lot, and his impressive debut, The Vast of Night , proves him pretty much right.     The story centres on Fay and Everett (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz) a pair of geeky teenagers beginning to feel like fleeing their 1950s rural south-Texas town. They’re both into science, communications and new technology; Fay works on the town’s switchboard while Everett is a local radio jockey. One fateful night, while the rest of the town is watching a local high school basketball game, they hear something over the airwaves that…well, its ali...

One of the very few criticisms made of Tom Hanks, whose reputation at this point is almost too good to be true, is that his projects are sometimes overly sentimental. Filmmakers can struggle to reign in his overwhelming natural goodness, or else find suitable narratives to surround it, to the point where last year he had to play Fred freakin’ Rogers in order to earn any critical attention.   It’s a little surprising then that Greyhound , the latest Hanks led film for which he also penned the screenplay, is almost totally devoid of anything saccharine or sweet; in fact it’s about as efficient and business like as anything he’s done in years. Adapted from a C S Forester novel, Greyhound focuses on an American supply convoy during world war two as it fends off a series of German U-boat attacks. Hanks plays commander Ernest Krause, who is privately very religious, has a lady waiting back home, and that’s about it. The vast majority of the exceedingly brisk runtime (80 minutes sans...

Back in the halcyon days of 2014 Charlize Theron had the world at her feet. Oscar success was already in the bag and she had proven capable of leading comedies, blockbusters, indie dramas and everything in-between. What would she choose to do given that she had the power to choose nearly anything? Well…become the world’s leading action star of course; hands up who saw that coming?     Between Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde and The Fate of the Furious Theron is now the most convincing onscreen western ass kicker this side of Keanu Reeves, and she’s back again this week with the Netflix produced The Old Guard , directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood of Love and Basketball fame.           She plays Andy, the leader of a group of mercenaries who are all basically Wolverine without the claws, meaning they’re indestructible killing machines who sometimes get a bit mopey because they’ve been around so long, the blessing of immortality also being a curse ...

Movies are in crisis, and in the last couple of months Christopher Nolan’s TENET has come into focus as the clear bellwether for an industry that has, understandably, lost any idea of what it’s doing. It makes a lot of sense, especially in the absence of a big Disney release, to use a Nolan film as a kind of grand opening event, given his almost unique positioning as a truly auteur filmmaker who balances explosive populist entertainment with high minded, ideas driven story-telling better than anybody currently working.     The man has become a brand unto himself, with a rabid online legion of film-bro fans (and critics) and an immediately identifiable set of aesthetic and narrative signifiers that have earned him a blank check from Warner Bros for over a decade now. And while many would point to his second Batman film, The Dark Knight , as his major breakout, I think it was his follow-up that truly solidified him as the kind of filmmaker who can dictate the trends of a whole...