Venom (2018 Marvel Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures) Directed by Ruben Fleischer, featuring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed. This recent addition to the Marvel superhero/monster-menace series of films is a great box office success, but critics are harder to please. First of all, there is no doubt that Venom contains a comic-book … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Venom and Early Man
C’est La Vie (2017, France) Directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano. Featuring: Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jean-Paul Rouve, Gilles Lelouche, Eye Haidara, Benjamin Lavernhe and Hélène Vincent. This light French comedy (with subtitles) is set in a single day as it follows the preparations and mayhem of a troubled wedding celebration at a grand Chateau. Writer-directors … Continue reading The Two Reviews: C’est La Vie and The Breaker Upperers
Good Time (2017, A24, Elara Pictures & Rhea Films) Directed by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie, featuring Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh Benny Safdie and Barkhad Abdi It is just too rare to find a film like Good Time these days. Independently stylish, original, creative story pitch, and taut, knife-edge action. There are no ground-breaking … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Good Time and Ideal Home
Avengers: Infinity War (2018, Marvel Studios & Walt Disney Studios) Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, featuring Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Josh Brolin (and a heap of others). Avengers: Infinity War is a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero film, and a sequel to two previous Avengers films. This is a long … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story
‘I like cooking up extra ideas to add to the sets and costumes, and inventing an imaginary world. But what I'm more inspired by is something that happened to me or someone in my life who had a strong effect on me, or a novel, short story, play, or a movie where the characters moved … Continue reading Appraising the Art of Anderson. Wesley Wales Anderson
The Death of Stalin (2018, eOne films & Gaumont) Directed by Armando Iannucci, featuring Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs, Rupert Friend, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Dermot Crowley and Jeffrey Tambor The biting political and social satire of Armando Iannucci has struck a chord with many viewers from his breakthrough with The Day Today … Continue reading The Two Reviews: The Death of Stalin and Annihilation
Australiana, noun - items relating to or characteristic of Australia. As the Australian film critic Luke Buckmaster pointed out recently, the madly popular 1980s blockbuster Crocodile Dundee not only gave the world a less than flattering impression of Australians, it was also racist, sexist and homophobic. As fun as it may have seemed when I … Continue reading A Slice of Australiana in Five Films
'...a vehicle for comedy and for showing character flaws...' This dark comedy was filmed in 33 days on a relatively small budget, released in late 2017 in the US and had a world release in January 2018. It has already picked up numerous awards. This doesn’t automatically qualify it as a great film, but to … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017 Martin McDonagh)
The team at Momentary Cinema (JJ McDermott, Alan Matthews and Robin Stevens) have decided to form our review of the year in film through a discussion format. Now, this format did not have us sit down and have someone record our nerd-ish ramblings. That would be difficult considering that there is a non-conforming, geographical issue … Continue reading Momentary Cinema’s Review of the Year 2017 in Film – Part 1
This is the second in a series of posts on the filmmaking of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980): one of the greatest directors of all time. These posts are authored by Robin Stevens, JJ McDermott and Alan Matthews, and the idea is for each part to take a selection of Hitchcock’s films and analyze them in detail. … Continue reading Exploring Hitchcock Part 2: The Early Masterpieces and his (not so) Grand Finale
Momentary Cinema 