I am a huge admirer of director Damien Chazelle. His previous films have all been in my top 20 best movies of the year. Whiplash was extraordinary. La La Land I fell in love with, and First Man was a visual treat. Now we get Babylon, a breathtaking, roller-coaster ride through the early days of…
Tár
The thought of watching a 2-hour 37-minute drama about a female concert conductor with an odd title may not be the most inviting thing you will hear. However, forget about the subject matter, for this is an extraordinary piece of cinema from a director whose last film, Little Children, was made 16 years ago. It…
Corsage
There has been a lot of interest in Empress Elizabeth of Austria recently. At least five TV and film productions have been produced of late, including this, Corsage, which follows the year of the popular Empress as she approaches her 40th birthday. Yet for those unfamiliar with the lady, and while this looks magnificent and…
Top Ten Movies of 2022
Here we are again with another list of movies that I thought were the best of the year. This year, regardless of what you may have heard, was tricky. There were better movies than bad, so narrowing it down to ten films was tough. As usual, I have a list of films that didn’t quite…
Avatar: The Way Of Water
It was 13 years ago that James Cameron, still riding high on the success of the terrible Titanic, broke his own records with the surprisingly dull Avatar, a movie which can be explained quite simply as two hours of tree hugging and the final act where they blew up the trees! I wasn’t holding my…
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel Pinocchio, has been a source of many a film adaptation. Disney’s 1940 version is probably the most famous, although their recent remake by Robert Zemeckis is a pointless exercise. Now, merely months after that version, Academy award-wining director Guillermo del Toro has delivered a stop-motion animated film that takes the premise…
Violent Night
If you are a fan of the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, you will remember the start has an advert for an up-and-coming TV movie with Lee Majors called The Night The Reindeer Died. The premise was Santa Claus was under attack by terrorists, and only Lee Major could save them. Somebody had obviously thought…
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical
Cinematic musicals have had a rough time in recent years. The genre was almost killed off in one fell swoop by Cats back in 2019, but thankfully it has been saved by the likes of Encanto and last year’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Now, one of the biggest hits on the West End stage has…
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Rian Johnson is a man who has the perfect answer for his critics. After he was slated for making the second in the new Star Wars trilogy, The Last Jedi, Johnson made Knives Out, an old-fashioned whodunnit with a delicious cast and a lead character who could easily be called the new Hercules Poirot. The…
The Menu
A few weeks ago, we had the satire Triangle of Sadness, which depicted the rich and wealthy having a time on board a luxury yacht. Now we have The Menu, a perfect companion to the movie, as mentioned earlier, in which we have an exclusive restaurant for the super-rich, which turns out to be a…
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Black Panther was a cinematic phenomenon when it hit the screens in 2018. It broke box office records, became the first and only superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and was a complete game changer for black cinema. A sequel was inevitable. However, no one would have predicted that the film’s star,…
Stu Loves Film 