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Tom Slater
Mud: as sweet, and sickly, as barbecue chicken
Jeff Nichols’ highly lauded tale of adolescence in the Deep South is simple and effective, if saccharine fare.
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| Friday 17 May 2013 |
Tom Slater
The Star Trek hype? It’s illogical, captain.
The second instalment of JJ Abrams’ franchise reboot is more pointless popcorn than pop philosophy.
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| Friday 19 April 2013 |
Tom Slater
Sex-crazed, drug-fuelled, gun-toting babes in bikinis
Spring Breakers is a perfect, knowingly trashy film for a generation that thinks ridiculous is a compliment.
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| Tuesday 16 April 2013 |
Daniel Ben-Ami
Modern Zionists: gatekeepers of what?
A new Israeli documentary shows that Zionism has lost its nationalist vigor and now plays the victim card.
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| Friday 5 April 2013 |
Tom Slater
In the House: the author, revisited
François Ozon once again puts a writer at the centre of his latest witty and dark exploration of fact and fiction.
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| Friday 22 March 2013 |
Tom Slater
The reincarnation of Snoop Dogg
In a new documentary, the legendary rapper goes to Jamaica, embraces Rastafarianism and puts away his past. Or does he?
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| Friday 15 March 2013 |
Tom Slater
Stoker: an almost accidental work of genius
Oldboy director Chan-wook Park’s English-language debut turns a derivative script into a striking movie.
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| Friday 8 March 2013 |
Tom Slater
A nostalgic trip to the road movie era
So Yong Kim’s For Ellen pays homage to 1970s American cinema but fails to capture its terse emotionality.
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| Thursday 28 February 2013 |
Tom Slater
Giving the real Hitchcock a cameo role
A new film about the making of the iconic shower slasher, Psycho, is too shallow to shed light on the master of suspense.
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| Friday 22 February 2013 |
Tom Slater
The Oscars: it’s Abe versus the Argo-nauts
From soppy sentiment to fawning over method actors, the Oscars have become predictable. Sunday’s ceremony could change that.
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| Friday 15 February 2013 |
Tom Slater
Wrecking the magic of kids’ movies
Wreck-It Ralph is so busy providing nostalgia for greying gamers, it forgets to enthrall children.
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| Friday 8 February 2013 |
Tom Slater
America vs OBL: the weirdest war
Ignore the luvvies who say she supports torture - Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is cleverly ambiguous about the 'war on terror'.
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| Friday 1 February 2013 |
Tom Slater
Django vs Lincoln: clash of the slave films
Tarantino stands accused of blaxploitation, but does his movie tell a greater truth than Spielberg’s?
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| Tuesday 29 January 2013 |
Tom Slater
Amour: an unflinching look at decline and death
Michael Haneke’s story of an elderly couple coping with infirmity is both tragic and powerfully life-affirming.
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| Friday 11 January 2013 |
Tom Slater
The Impossible: a giant wave of sentimentality
Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster movie about the Boxing Day tsunami starts well, but ends up as a cynical tearjerker.
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| Friday 4 January 2013 |
Tom Slater
The Hobbit: an unexpected pleasure
For all the fears that Peter Jackson had unduly stretched Tolkien’s slim novel, in fact he’s given us a rollicking watch.
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| Friday 21 December 2012 |
Tom Slater
From a badass Bond to a tedious Ted
Film purists can snort all they like, but 2012 was a great year for the silver screen (with some turkeys, of course).
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| Friday 7 December 2012 |
Tom Slater
A damning indictment of the War on Drugs
Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, The House I Live In shows the damage done by prohibition to inner-city communities.
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| Thursday 29 November 2012 |
Tom Slater
Making a drama out of a hostage crisis
The weirdest thing about Ben Affleck’s 70s-set thriller about escaping from Iran is that it’s (mostly) true.
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| Friday 23 November 2012 |
Tom Slater
What’s so noble about Anonymous?
In the latest in our series of spiked shorts, our film reviewer Tom Slater takes an axe to 'hacktivism'.
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