Recently caught Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film, the misleadingly titled, and even more so in its English language title, La prisonniere. Nothing in his oeuvre hitherto quite prepares you for it…

Having been born in the same year in which Help! was made, I consider it fitting enough to claim Ron Howard's exemplary Beatles documentary as my 7,000th film …

Six days in the lives of this pair who barely speak to one another, and it took me nearly as long to finish the film. This is not to say that The Turin Horse is a hard slog not worth the bother; far from it…

Have recently seen two films (Young Adult and A Quiet Passion - see links for a fuller individual appreciation) which, in their different ways, ruminate over the lot of their ageing female characters …

After Bergman, it is Scorsese's turn to meditate on God's silence, in his tale of a Jesuit priest enduring persecution in seventeenth century Japan. As Father Rodrigues hides in the undergrowth and watches members of his flock suffer…

Just seen Ozon's Jeune & Jolie, and found it to be as elegant and mixed up as its young heroine, uncertain whether it is offering a comment on the prevalent sexualisation of youngsters' lives leading to frigid wantonness, …

The Neon Demon, NWR’s latest piece of provocation (he’s like a more genre-motivated Lars Von Trier), begins with one of those visual and aural grand statements, a reclining model/mannequin(?)…

Michael Moore's latest film, Where to Invade Next, is a tour of European countries - Italy, France, Germany, Norway, Finland, Slovenia, Iceland - and Tunisia, to see if he can find one thing they have got right, in their welfare system…

Ben Wheatley's most visually flamboyant picture to date understandably evokes memories of Cronenberg…

Sorrentino's latest is a riot of sagging flesh and portentous theatrics…

I am not sure what is worse, the narcissistic assumption that we are as interested in his opus numbers as we might have been in Fellini's, or the unbridled and increasing tendency to defile his models…

Peter Mayle's book, A Year in Provence, was a newstand hit at the same time I spent my own very formative year there, and so I resisted reading it and, for a long time, resisted watching Scott's screen version of it…

Having been drawn by some irresistible force (sic) to visit J. J. Abrams Star Wars reboot, I was underwhelmed by the storytelling, even if some shots, like the last one, attained some sort of mythic greatness…

I have seen the best film of 2015 and its name is Carol. It is as close to perfection as anything you could hope to see, short of a re-run of Doctor Zhivago. It's a love story that does not forget the other characters…

Two movies just seen, The Martian and The Walk, exemplify the symbiotic relationship Hollywood now has with CGI. It is hard to conceive of anything that cannot be realized for the screen, with the possible exception of the human face, which still resists digital counterfeiting…

Just caught Denis Villeneuve's taut new thriller,…

Just saw Face of a Fugitive on Film Four, and what a great B-movie Western it is. But more than that, it caused me to reflect as I watched Fred MacMurray's effortlessly charismatic performance,…

As my French colleague's pronunciation of their name never fails to remind me, the Minions are nothing if not cute (Fr. mignon). And this third film featuring the droll little critters trades heavily on that fact…

I made a discovery a couple of weeks ago from which I am still reeling with surprise and elation. It was Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 film, I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba), made as the world recovered from the Bay of Pigs crisis…

The arrival of a new film by Michael Mann is an event indeed for any self-respecting male cinephile, particularly of thrillers. Like Howard Hawks and Walter Hill before him, his narratives are ones in which the professional virtues are upheld,…