James Marsh

Pain & Gain

I sincerely believe that one day Michael Bay will make a masterpiece. To-date I still believe that The Rock is his best film. I know that Bad Boys 2 has… Read More
Sixteen Candles

One of the top tier John Hughes efforts that somehow passed me by until now. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, and it’s her sixteenth birthday – but her entire family seems… Read More
2001: A Space Odyssey

What is there left to be said about Stanley Kubrick’s deep-space masterpiece. Not only is it the greatest work of science fiction ever put on screen, it’s one of the… Read More
Red 2

No doubt plenty of fun for all involved, there is little to recommend in this sequel to Robert Schwentke’s 2010 effort. Following the lead of The Expendables, Red takes the… Read More
Simon Killer

A strange little film from US director Antonio Campos that sees Simon, and American uni grad head off to Paris after a messy break-up with his girlfriend. While there he… Read More
The Grandmaster

A re-watch of Wong Kar Wai’s beautiful meditation on martial arts and heroism, shot through with his perennial preoccupations of time, aging and fading memories. Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi… Read More
City of Women

This late colour entry from Federico Fellini sees Marcello Mastroianni play a philandering womaniser who follows hs latest conquest off a train and into a dreamworld populated solely by women.… Read More
Prince Avalanche

After a troubling daliance in stoner comedy, David Gordon Green returns to the more independent, thoughtful material on which he made his name. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play maintenance… Read More
Koyaanisqatsi

One of the finest – and certainly my favourite – non-narrative films ever made, Godfrey Reggio’s beautiful work examines mankind’s relationship with the natural world through a kaleidoscope of juxtaposed… Read More
Rigor Mortis

Juno Mak’s directorial debut is a moody revivial of the quintessentially Hong Kong hopping vampire films of the 1980s. Assembling a cast of horror veterans, headed by Chin Siu Ho,… Read More
Live And Let Die

You never need an excuse to rewatch a James Bond film, even a middling entry like Guy Hamilton’s Live And Let Die, but this time I was attentively revisiting the… Read More
The Stone Roses: Made of Stone

British filmaker and self-confessed Stone Roses fan Shane Meadows chronicles the legendary Manchester band’s brief and heated comeback in fine style in this passionate documentary. Meadows takes the time to… Read More
Mr. Go

When her grandfather dies, 15-year-old Wei Wei (Xu Jiao) inherits his circus, particularly their star attraction: a baseball-playing gorilla, Ling Ling. Unfortunately, she also inherits his huge gambling debts and… Read More
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

I was unfamiliar with the source material of this Twilight-esque tale of angels and demons walking the Earth amongst us. The film was fairly resoundingly dismissed upon released, both by… Read More
The Fog

Right in the middle of his golden period, John Carpenter gave us this entertaining ghost story about a small coastal town founded atop a leper colony that is enveloped in… Read More
White House Down

Roland Emmerich’s take on the “Die Hard in the White House” action set-up that was visited earlier this year in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, is a far bigger, louder… Read More
The Conjuring

James Wan’s most interesting and artistically successful film since the original Saw goes back to basics, delivering an incredibly effective haunted house tale, with some added ghost hunter fun thrown… Read More
Seconds

Rock Hudson stars as Tony Wilson, the newly rejuvenated version of tired businessman Arthur Hamilton, who enlisted the services of a secret organisation to give him a “second chance” at… Read More