‘Man, knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery.’ Miles Davis, from Miles: The Autobiography. The musical legend biopic has always been a tough nut to crack. Through cinematic history there have been a number of greats, with Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story and Kurt Russell as ‘The …
Read More »High-Rise
Ben Wheatley’s anarchic monument to JG Ballard’s satire is pupose-built to startle, but its towering ambition comes with a few floors In Life, the Universe and Everything, the third volume of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the congenitally hapless Arthur Dent – who has just become a …
Read More »Ginger Baker’s Jazz Confusion Live
Few musicians have lived the rock & roll lifestyle to the level of Ginger Baker and survived to tell the tale. The profile of the uber-talented jazz drummer from the early 60’s went interstellar when he formed supergroup Cream with Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton in 1966, and the famously …
Read More »The Man From U.N.C.L.E
Early into his career, the jury was out on Guy Ritchie. He delivered the double smash hits Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch at the end of the 90’s and was hailed as the UK’s answer to Quentin Tarantino. But he quickly became typecast as a gangster film …
Read More »Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
It’s a sign of the times in Hollywood that the number of films in each franchise is creeping up way beyond the old trilogy formula. We have four Indiana Jones, Mad Max and Jurassic Park films, seven Star Wars, and five Die Hards, Terminators and, now, Mission Impossibles. All have …
Read More »The Krays reunited at BFI Southbank
We soak up a bloody – and timely – reminder of when the Spandau Brothers smashed through the barricades of law and order As we approach the 9 September release of hotly anticipated Tom Hardy double-helping Legend, in which the actor plays both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the BFI …
Read More »Hard to Be a God
Don’t believe the baying praise from the hardcore arthouse crowd – this God-awful mess makes it hard to be a viewer Science fiction cinema and medievalism have been unlikely spirit twins for decades. Almost every post-apocalypse since the original Planet of the Apes has hinged on a society gone back …
Read More »Ant-Man
Ever since Marvel opened its own studio doors for business with Iron Man in 2008, their winning formula has largely centred on assembling the line-up for The Avengers. Whilst Ant-Man pays lip service to the franchise at large, it’s otherwise a refreshingly stand-alone story with a more comical bent than …
Read More »The Scarlet Gospels, by Clive Barker
Rhythm Circus attends a resurrection of the Liverpudlian polymath’s “different side”. It’s about goddamn time “Barely had the flow of sounds come to a halt than the power in the words rose up, creating a stench, the stink of life and death rolled into one monstrous river of sentient grease, …
Read More »Why Terminator Genisys is Better than its Press
Arnie’s latest action opus has suffered a horrific reception and hasn’t even crossed $100m domestically. Our resident Terminator nut thinks critics have overlooked a playful narrative remix – even if James Cameron’s touch is missed Left for dead by the garbled, unloved and all-round ironically named Terminator: Salvation, the franchise …
Read More »