This film is what the definition of a guilty pleasure should be, because you feel like you've committed a series of seedy felonies while watching it. Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco is the most essential American pre-70s antihero, with his schemes upon shameless schemes unfolding and stacking sloppily as he uses and abuses literally his entire address book to cover his own arse. He and Burt Lancaster fight out a mental duel across the city; one a shifty bottom feeder,…

Agnes Varda is one of the most inventive, ionate and empathetic filmmakers in history. This movie, her best (and the best French New Wave film by far), is a beautiful, at times morbid film where the joy and love for the craft jumps off the screen and stays with you well after. The vast range of shots that Varda uses to depict Cleo’s wandering malaise through Paris as she kills time waiting for life-changing medical results create a playful atmosphere,…

You could call this a “love letter to cinema” if you want, but love letters generally have words, as opposed to the half a dozen or so lines we get in this ghostly slow burner. This is more like a small, thoughtful gesture of immense devotion that was never witnessed and nobody will ever see; heartbreaking, bittersweet, deeply moving. Long takes and wide shots populate this contemplative piece by Tsai Ming-liang, which tell a handful of micro-stories amidst the screening…

I have lived a significantly altered life since I saw this as a teenager. Ingmar Bergman’s moody, often astoundingly bleak musing on the nature of life and death is, in that sense, one of the few essential films in my life, and quite likely a perfect film, whatever the hell that means. Every performance cuts deep to the bone, and they are lit in the most exquisite high contrast lighting I have ever seen. As is to be expected with…

The bored, spurned housewife is a pretty common trope in cinema, and is usually used to great effect; classics such as A Woman Under the Influence and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles are some of the best of the form. Their pain is seen often from the outside though - an observer looking in on a hollow existence. In Swallow, Carlo Mirabella-Davis shows us the internal life of our lead spouse in more ways than one. When…

Media is always evolving. In fact, it evolves at a lighting pace that we as humans can’t keep up with whatsoever. We use it to help make sense of a hostile world, but what happens if the media and the world leave you behind? David Robert Mitchell reckons you get Sam, a paranoid borderline deviant who may be on the spectrum, and is deep diving into the mystery of his beautiful neighbour’s disappearance. But is there a mystery at all?…

This movie was an absolute treat, and to see it in a beautiful cinema with a beautiful person on Valentine's Day made it a perfect experience. Absolutely brimming with life and humour, it is the powers of some of Hollywood's best firing on all cylinders. When your vigour and ion are captured so magnificently on celluloid like this, you can never die. Sing alongs, robberies, hijinks and animal lust - what the hell else are you looking for in a…

This movie was dark, horrifying and I loved every moment of it. It was an ongoing nightmare; a movie that offered no relent or remorse to its viewers or characters. It also felt extremely claustrophobic - characters were consistently dripping with sweat, and often found themselves in tight spaces. The story offered a simple revenge tale, but what was on show was the imagination and ingenuity to get us there. An absolute punk masterclass in both visual design with the…

I went into this expecting something completely different, and while I wasn't disappointed, I definitely was too hungover for it. "Ramen Western" really undersells it - nothing wrong with emulating cowboys, and there's plenty of it in there, but it's more Tati than Ford I'd say. This is chock full of genuine, heartfelt moments that are loosely related in a larger web of human relations through food, which have been shot with a reverence and care that elevates cuisine to…

There's a sequence in this movie that is equal parts utterly bizarre, out of place and absolutely hilarious - The Fat Boys (the beloved pioneers of beatboxing playing themselves, obviously), having just failed in their quest, walk past a restaurant offering "all you can eat", so, naturally, they break into a song called, well, All You Can Eat. It's emblematic of this whole weird and wonderful movie; funny, catchy, packed with 80's style, and ludicrously, hopelessly devoid of reason or…

Empathy is a difficult thing to evoke in a film at the best of times, but when you're delivered the perspective of a sick, deteriorating old man who doesn't quite experience time linearly, and you can gel with it, something special has definitely been achieved. Florian Zeller delivers a piece that utilises the medium well, and though adapted from a play, the claustrophobic, shifting single set suits film better, where the expectation of difference and variety in what we're presented…