I'm sure any discerning film fan could relate to my elation as I opened the pages of the newspaper yesterday to read that Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' is set for a May 4th release in the UK, before anywhere else in the world. There were hopes that the film, which, as you may perceive from the trailer below, looks set to be a moving, truly seminal piece about time and human life, would be released last year. Alas, production delays mea... Continue Reading

The day has finally arrived. The past year has been a great one for film, and tonight is the night that the best will be awarded, and consequently immortalised, inaugurated into a long list of classic motion pictures. Below are the nominations, in bold my predicted winners. Best Motion Picture: The King’s Speech, The Social Network, The Fighter, Inception, Black Swan, True Grit, Toy Story 3, The Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours, Winterâ€... Continue Reading

Has it become a cliché to use E. M Forster’s wonderfully accurate phrase ‘only connect’? If it has, I’m going ahead and using it anyway, as nothing quite captures just what makes two of the most important films of the past year tick. Those films are The Social Network and The King’s Speech, the two out of ten nominees with most chance of winning this year’s Oscar for Best Picture. Many see them as fundamentally different works in bot... Continue Reading

Is it possible for a film to be too good? As ridiculous as that may sound, there is a tendency to call a film ‘too sophisticated’ or ‘worthy’ as though it’s a bad thing, connoting emotional sedateness and lack of originality. I saw ‘Never Let Me Go’, the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, five months ago at the London Film Festival. In the time I have waited for its national release to see it again, I have tried my best to... Continue Reading

The Nominees: Christian Bale for The Fighter Mark Ruffalo for The Kids Are All Right Geoffrey Rush for The King's Speech Jeremy Renner for The Town John Hawkes for Winter's Bone

A washed up, drug addicted boxing trainer. A sperm donor who forms a relationship with the two children he never intended to know. A mild-mannered Australian speech the... Continue Reading

With mere hours left until the announcement of the Oscar nominations, now is a good time to reflect on what a year it's been for cinema. If my predictions, listed below, prove to be correct, then I think the Academy would pretty much have got it right this year, for I truly believe (excluding the titles I am yet to see, such as 'Animal Kingdom' and 'Get Low') that these films represent the very best of mainstr... Continue Reading

How do you judge a film to be ‘great’? That’s the question, amongst others, that I find myself asking when predicting the list of this year’s Best Picture nominees. Within that ten, there are only really five frontrunners (see my upcoming article with all my predictions) with a chance of picking up the prize, so what it is about these five films that makes them ‘great’, w... Continue Reading

Many a film fan would say, and reasonably so, that the awards season, occupying the cinematic calendar from November until the culminating Academy Awards ceremony in late February/early March, is meaningless. These months are often characterized by the shameless promotion of films made and financed for the purpose of winning the trophies, many with an air of worthiness and ‘quality’ stereotypically set during a certain period or around a ... Continue Reading