My least favourite films of 2017

These are the ones that brought me least pleasure, or most annoyance, during the past 12 months. Some of them put me at odds with many of you, I know! Click on the film title below for my original thoughts on each one. Favourite films of the year coming up in the next post! Number 5 – …

Assassin’s Creed

I'm so sad, I spent most of the time thinking that the apostrophe in the title is in the wrong place. Surely the creed is that of more than one assassin? The fact that I had time to think this also probably tells you just how engaged I was with this film - answer is: …

The Light Between Oceans

It is official. My heart is made of stone. Shannon Plumb, wife of director Derek Cianfrance, wrote that the reason this film was not well received at the Venice Film Festival is because most film critics at the screenings were men. She wrote: Women who see the film love it. When they did the weekend …

X-Men: Apocalypse

Wins the award for strangest use of Oscar Isaac in a movie. From what I could make out, he woke up a bit grumpy one day and decided to take over the world. Oh, and watch a little Star Trek. Having seen this a couple of days ago now, I keep remembering certain scenes but am …

Macbeth

I love Shakespeare, but I'm not a purist who insists that everything should be done as 'written' by Will himself. So it didn't bother me that things had been 'cut' for the screenplay here - in fact, often it's totally necessary to help a play make the successful move from stage to screen. And with …

The Year of the Alternative Western?

Note: These musings contain mild spoilers for El Ardor (The Burning). It's the darndest thing. I've just watched Gael García Bernal's latest film El Ardor. It's set in the Argentinian rainforest but towards the end I found myself thinking of two other films I'd seen recently - Slow West, starring Michael Fassbender, and The Salvation, …

Slow West

One of the advantages of having the newly-opened HOME complex in Manchester is that we will hopefully get more of these types of events - this was the official UK premiere of the film, followed by Q&A with the director John Maclean (Michael Fassbender had chosen to launch Macbeth at Cannes instead of being in …

Picks from Cannes 2015

No, I won't be going unfortunately, but some of the films in this year's line-up have been announced today and here are the ones that I'm particularly looking forward to once they are eventually released to mere mortals (probably next year, if we're lucky). The opening film is La Tête haute, directed by France's Emmanuelle …

My top 10 (or 12) films of 2014

Let me explain my title Two of my top 10 films of 2014 were seen very early in the year, but had already been on wide release in just about every other country apart from the UK in 2013.  So by the time I saw them, they had already taken their plaudits, appeared on many …

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Well paint me blue and call me Mystique. You know what I like? I like Hugh Jackman, Michael Fassbender and Patrick Stewart. Put them all together in a mind-bogglingly confusing wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey storyline, and you have a rip-roaring movie which cannily re-sets the X-Men universe for any number of future X-Men excursions. Although not quite as …