Category: Screen

As Alfred Hitchcock once said: “self-plagiarism is style”. The writer/director Wes Anderson, whose best-known films include The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums, has been self-plagiarising for some time now, and boy, is his style distinctive. He is, in fact, among the most visually distinctive auteurs working today. His idiosyncratic, teeth-achingly fastidious aesthetic is defined with labels

Director John Krasinski’s twitchy monster movie A Quiet Place contains shots of a whiteboard, with rather elementary information written on it. The potential number of beasts in the immediate vicinity, for example, and basic techniques for survival in his morbid vision of the future. In almost any other film this would constitute a laughably rudimentary

Was A Wrinkle in Time intended to be a rainbow-coloured nightmare for children – like Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal, but with an obnoxiously bright palette? The Day-Glo aesthetic in director Ava DuVernay’s mega-budget family film is like a character itself. A character with, of course, no lines of dialogue, unlike the many babbling seers

The Mary Magdalene depicted in Lion director Garth Davis’ second feature film is a far cry from the desperate damaged goods portrayed by Barbara Hershey in The Last Temptation of Christ, and the swooning, motherly servant who famously sang about not knowing “how to love him” in Jesus Christ Superstar. Both these depictions continued the

Armando Iannucci’s new, ferociously sharp and funny tragicomedy explores power-grabbing among top level Russian ministers, in the aftermath of the titular event. The Death of Stalin has drawn many responses along the lines of ‘a film for our times’ and ‘particularly relevant given today’s headlines’. The implication being that Iannucci, creator of The Thick of