Yorgos Lanthimos has to be one of the most exciting directors. His films push the boundaries, not only in moviemaking but also story telling. With his last hit, the brilliant Poor Things, still ringing in our heads with its bizarre tale and strong visuals, we now have Kinds of Kindness, another head-spinning movie broken into…
Author: Stuart Wren
The Bikeriders
I rewatched Easy Rider the other night. The seminal biker movie from 1969 starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and a young Jack Nicholson is a disjointed, incidental film that doesn’t have a plot but has moments. Having watched Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, the director of Take Shelter, Mud and Loving seems to have decided that…
Inside Out 2
Things haven’t been great for Pixar in recent years. Three of their best films (Soul, Luca, and Turning Red) were sent straight to Disney+ due to the pandemic, while their recent cinema releases, Lightyear and Elemental, failed to ignite that flame they used to have. Now, they have turned to one of their best films,…
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die
It was 1996 when we were first introduced to Mike Lawrey and Marcus Burnett, the two Miami cops who consider themselves Bad Boys, even though they are just ordinary buddy cops that appear in most action thrillers like this. Except the dynamics were slightly more interesting: Mike, the single womanizer who drives around in a…
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
When you think of great directors, you may think of Hitchcock, Spielberg, Scorsese, and David Lean, to name a few. Not many mention the name George Miller on that list. Maybe it’s time we did because with his latest film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, he has definitely cemented his name as one of the…
IF
John Krasinski comes across as a really decent bloke. He came to fame as Jim in the American version of The Office. He helped us through lockdown with his Good News videos, made one of the best horrors of the 21st century in A Quiet Place, and is married to Emily Blunt, making them one…
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes
When Charlton Heston uttered those immortal words, “Keep your stinking paws off me, you filthy apes!” back in 1968, who would have known that over 50 years later, those apes would still be famous with the audience enough to allow them a new movie, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. After Any Serkis’s Caesar…
The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy was a throw-away TV series that filled the schedules in the 80s, with Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. It followed the same vein as The A-Team when you could turn your television on a Saturday evening and watch without thinking. Now we get the feature reboot…
Love Lies Bleeding
How long have we been waiting for a film noir thriller with lesbians, bodybuilding, gun running and steroid abuse? Well, now we can wait no longer for Love Lies Bleeding, the new film by director Rose Glass, who gave us the excellent Saint Maud, has delivered all of this and then some. This stylish, imaginative…
Challengers
Tennis isn’t my go-to sport. I will watch it occasionally, and I have played it in the past, but it’s not a sport that makes me sit for hours while Wimbledon is on. There have been few films that have won me over, either. Battle of the Sexes with Emma Stone and Steve Carell was…
Back To Black
You wait ages for a musician biopic; two come along almost simultaneously. We had Bob Marley: One Love, which failed to capture the true spirit of the reggae star, and now we have Back to Black, the story of Amy Winehouse, the powerhouse singer whose life was cut so short. Both stars had documentaries covering…
Civil War
Cinema can be a powerful source of projecting what is happening today. Looking back to the 70s, one can see the paranoia of post-Vietnam and the 80s for its Regean-ite freedom and greed of the rich. Now, we are in a world where war seems to fill the news agenda, and America is divided politically….
Stu Loves Film 