Reviews

With Flight, director Robert Zemeckis has made a solid, unshowy character drama, the kind of film cinemagoers of a certain age will tell you the studios don't really make any more. It reminds me a little of an Eastwood movie - specifically, with Eastwood in his capacity as a film director, that is.

The game-changing ’70s AOR blockbuster turns 35 with a super deluxe boxset...

Affable Americana from Nashville statesmen...

Lincoln begins with the Battle of Jenkin’s Ferry in Arkansas in April, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War. It is a messy, close-quarter scrap in the mud between black and Confederate soldiers, with men shooting, stabbing, punching, flailing and gouging at each other. The rest of Spielberg’s film is about conflict, too, but of a less visceral kind: the constitutional battles Lincoln faces on screen, and the tussle off-camera between Spielberg’s ropey tendencies to mythologise and Tony Kushner’s scrupulous screenplay that strives for fact and precision.

Vocal collaboration draws ancient and modern together...

Soulful debut is stunning introduction to producer's talents...

Zero Dark Thirty is a companion piece to The Hurt Locker, the previous film from director Kathryn Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal. But while The Hurt Locker viewed the War on Terror in microcosm, focussing on a three-man bomb disposal team during the Iraq war, Zero Dark Thirty tells a bigger story: the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, unfolding across a ten-year period in CIA Black Ops sites, military bases and embassies in destinations as far a field as Pakistan, Gdansk, London and the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

An alternative history of the post-rock pioneers...

Kubrick's first film - a low budget treatise on war that compliments his later triumphs...

New Orleans soul prince revisits his doo-wop youth. Keith Richards and Don Was co-produce...