Philip Bagnall

HeadStuff • 16th July 2025

Eddington movie review | Ari Aster's Covid caper is his most self-satisfied film yet - HeadStuff

Are there any lessons left to be taken from the Covid-19 pandemic? It’s been five years since the world ground to a halt in response to disease and disaster, and it’s becoming increasingly clear we’ve learned nothing. Calls for compassion and community have been lost, with most people keeping their heads down as we wait for widespread famine to follow war and complete the quadrumvirate of the Apocalypse. Ari Aster’s Eddington arrives in this most fraught of contexts, and asks a question that’s o...

HeadStuff • 9th July 2025

Superman movie review | overplotting and overcorrection leaves a fine cast flapping in the wind - HeadStuff

How can you put a fresh spin on Superman? As a character, he’s always been little more than an overstretched metaphor, representing every hope of the white Christian America in which he was created. The ‘saviour of man’ story has been overdone, most notably in Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill’s iteration of Krypton’s favourite son. After Justice League failed to soar under the weight of its own importance, it was hard to see how the Man of Steel could take flight on the big screen again any time soo...

HeadStuff • 1st July 2025

Jurassic World Rebirth movie review | Just because you can prolong a franchise doesn’t mean you should - HeadStuff

Long before now, Jurassic Park became like a theme park you remember visiting in childhood. It was thrilling and fun, but the memories have been tarnished by add-ons and changes made to it in the intervening years. Revisiting the Park in the three decades since, either through its own lacklustre sequels or the Jurassic World trilogy that followed, became more of a threat than a promise. Each film has been worse than the last, to the point that Jurassic World: Dominion dug so far through the bott...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 1st July 2025

Cronenberg's Dance with Death in 'The Shrouds'

With the mesmerising The Shrouds, David Cronenberg explores death with openness and an awareness of his own identity and mortality.


The Shrouds is David Cronenberg’s 21st feature as director. Many of his previous 20 films have been hailed as masterworks because of his confidence in melding thematic weight with memorable grue. However, for all the morbid mayhem he has conjured, Cronenberg has scarcely probed the phenomenon of death itself. As we all age, we find ourselves confronted by our bel...

HeadStuff • 25th June 2025

F1 movie review | Take a Pitt stop with the Daddest Dad Movie that ever Dadded - HeadStuff

Sports movies feel surplus to requirements. They romanticize and celebrate their chosen game, even though a given sport is its own best advertisement. No film can recreate the in-person thrill of watching a game of ball, be it foot, base, basket or foos.


Movies centred around motor racing prove this point especially sharply; the subgenre tends to pinball between knowing cheese-fests (Think Days of Thunder, or the Fast and the Furious franchise if you remember the first few movies were actual...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 2nd June 2025

It Was Just an Accident Review: Road Rage

Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident captures the anger of a nation under a repressive jackboot with suspense and humanity.


Even if Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche had not been a vocal advocate of Panahi’s for many years, the choice of It Was Just an Accident for the Palme d’Or couldn’t help but be read as political. Panahi’s films are inherently political, even though he does his utmost to fold those instincts into a narrative with an eye to reaching the masses. (W...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 27th May 2025

Resurrection Review: Dreaming When We’re Awake

Bi Gan’s Resurrection is an ambitious and evocative tribute to cinema through the ages. Just don’t expect it to make much sense.


Gan’s previous feature Long Day’s Journey Into Night was a challenge to our perception of memory, but Resurrection might be an even more ambitious beast. 


The opening text of Resurrection tries to make sense of what’s to come. In an alternate reality, humans have achieved immortality by learning how not to dream. Of course, there are holdouts who continue to ente...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 23rd May 2025

Sound of Falling Review: Haunted House Story

With her uber-confident second feature film Sound of Falling, director Mascha Schilinski artfully dissects the 20th century in Germany.


Sound of Falling opens on Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbling down a hallway in her family home with a pair of crutches. Luckily, the leg she appears to be missing is revealed to be intact, and the crutches belong to her amputee uncle Fritz (Martin Rother). Schilinski lets us imagine Fritz lost the leg in the war (Either one), and lets Erika develop a quasi-erotic fa...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 23rd May 2025

Eleanor the Great Review: Queen of Manhattan

June Squibb is a hilarious delight in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor the Great, helping it overcome contrived plotting.


Eleanor the Great offers her another great leading role, but it has similar problems to Thelma with its script, leaving Squibb to do a lot of heavy lifting.


Despite Squibb’s leading role, the biggest name on Eleanor the Great’s poster is bound to be Scarlett Johansson. Making her directorial debut, the erstwhile Black Widow seeks to create a tribute to her...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 22nd May 2025

Sentimental Value Review: Dad’s Girls on Film

Joachim Trier delivers another portrait of modern familial angst with honesty and self-awareness in Cannes highlight Sentimental Value.


By the time Joachim Trier’s film arrived to the Croisette, every critic, industry rep and unpaid intern had spent the previous nine days fretting over ticket shortages, exhausting themselves to make room in their sleep-deprived schedule for more writing, and worrying they’re not good enough to be here because they missed a deadline. In that context, Sentiment...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 22nd May 2025

Highest 2 Lowest Review: Spike Does Kurosawa

In adapting one of Kurosawa’s finest films, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee at his most introspective and fun. A$AP Rocky steals the show.


Lee has been here before; his remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was criticized for being as unnecessary as it was generic. The 68-year-old director has clearly learned a few lessons from that debacle. With Highest 2 Lowest, he doesn’t reinvent the wheel, keeping the plot largely intact. However, he does put his own stamp on the material, giving us a colour...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 18th May 2025

Sirât Review: Sun, Sand and Salvation

Confrontational but contemplative, Oliver Laxe’s Sirât is a brilliantly energetic and well-crafted take on the long night of the soul.


By the end of the film, seven people will be broken and bonded by their shared experiences, and that’s not a reference to anything they might have dropped at a festival. Family is expected to survive through thick and thin, but no trip at a festival can compare to the roadtrip being taken in Sirât. 


The title and opening text of the film offer our first war...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 15th May 2025

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Review

Overlong, overcomplicated, but never really over, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning sees the franchise fuse burn out with a whimper.


Any plotting in these films was an excuse for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to get into increasingly ridiculous situations and stunts, cheered on by the finest team assembled by the IMF (Sad to say Christine La Garde does not make a cameo). Alas, that simplicity of concept is now gone, replaced by the modern franchise urge to tie everything together, no matter how...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 27th March 2025

Interview: Joshua Oppenheimer on The End

Ahead of the U.K. release of The End, we interview writer-director Joshua Oppenheimer about oil barons, empathy and existentialist dread.


Amongst the raft of ‘dark’ musicals that hit the screens in 2024, one film stood out from the rest. The End marks the narrative debut of writer-director Joshua Oppenheimer and, much like its director, it’s eloquent, memorable and passionate in its themes. This musical tale of a wealthy family and their assistants living in an underground bunker decades on f...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 13th March 2025

Black Bag Review: Do You Take This (Hit)Man?

A classy cast and slick filmmaking mark Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s tale of married spies, as a wickedly fun dissection of fidelity.


A mere two months later, Soderbergh unveils Black Bag. His new spy thriller sees the director back on narratively familiar turf in the vein of Haywire, but where that film offered unfiltered action setpieces with minimal commentary, Black Bag’s delights are more psychological, marrying Agatha Christie high concepts to deep distrust that’s more Edward Albee th...

HeadStuff • 6th March 2025

Mickey 17 Movie Review | R-Patz and Bong Joon Ho are Lost in Space - HeadStuff

When writer-director Bong Joon Ho took home four Oscars with Parasite, it was perceived as a breaking of the language barrier. The little box of subtitles at the bottom of the screen needn’t be a hindrance to cinematic entertainment, or so the new wisdom went. The irony is that his following film, Mickey 17, proves that point in the opposite direction. It’s in English, filled with notable names, and boasts the visual scale with which Bong’s most ambitious projects are associated. However, it rar...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 3rd February 2025

Bring Them Down Review: Lambs to Slaughter

Christoper Andrews’ directorial debut Bring Them Down is one-note but tense and well-made, with fiery turns from Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan.


It’s a given that their efforts are not worth the pain they inflict on themselves and those around them, but even if the leanness of the storytelling borders on nihilism, Andrews’ film still crackles with tension, and benefits from the commitment of his cast and crew.


Bring Them Down tells the story of Michael (Christopher Abbott, boasting a...

HeadStuff • 23rd January 2025

Adrien Brody Confronts Modern Evil In Brady Corbet's Bold Epic The Brutalist - HeadStuff

The Brutalist has a lot in common with the architectural style that inspired it. It’s imposing, intimidating, and it embraces its uglier elements, making them a feature rather than a bug. It houses the story of just a few people, but it reminds us that every person’s journey is an epic in its own right. Brady Corbet’s previous films have explored the tales of dictators and pop stars, mythologizing the kinds of people who mythologize themselves for a living. The Brutalist feels bigger by telling...

HeadStuff • 28th November 2024

Conclave | Ralph Fiennes Elevates Pulpy Papal Potboiler - HeadStuff

If history (Both recent and otherwise) has taught us anything, it’s that politics is a show. The demands of ceremony and functional government require us to facilitate the ego-stroking of the most ambitious and conniving members of society. Elections are (usually) big enough to dilute the megalomania somewhat, but the conclave of… er, Conclave comes down to a few dozen cardinals in the Sistine Chapel picking their next leader. Gossip and self-righteousness are the order of the day as the Catholi...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 25th November 2024

Interview: Producer Michael Jackman on Conclave

We interview Conclave producer Michael Jackman to discuss how to choose good films, avoiding trouble with the Vatican, and how to forget politics and have fun.


Among the potential nominees of this year’s awards season, Conclave is possibly the most ambitious from a narrative point of view. It’s a thriller, a character study, and a metaphor all at once. Adapted from Robert Harris’ novel, it’s a gripping peek behind the curtain at the assembly of cardinals to elect a new Pope, it has to balance...

HeadStuff • 13th November 2024

Gladiator II | Paul Mescal's Blockbuster Debut is All Talk and No Toga - HeadStuff

You know what’s still a terrific film? Gladiator.


Against all the odds (including on-set rewrites, injuries aplenty, and the death of a major actor mid-shoot), Ridley Scott’s 2000 behemoth achieved box office and awards success, and briefly revived the swords-and-sandals epic as a viable genre. That trend died out a few years later (Scott’s own Kingdom of Heaven was a notable casualty, though the Director’s Cut is well worth seeking out), but the fondness for such old-school epics amongst dir...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 28th October 2024

Small Things Like These Review: Small Town, Big Secrets

Small Things Like These is modest in runtime and ambition, but it allows Cillian Murphy’s sublime performance to convey its message and anger.


He lifted his head up when everyone else was keeping theirs down, and what he saw changed his life forever. It’s an epic hook on a local scale. It’s a more painful story than The Quiet Girl, which was also adapted from a Keegan novel, but one that seeks to stir its audience in similar ways with its humility and grace.


The story of Ireland’s Magdalen...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 20th October 2024

Justin Kurzel on Ellis Park: LFF Interview

In this interview with Ellis Park director Justin Kurzel, he tells us about Warren Ellis, making his first documentary, creativity, and more.


It’s been a busy year for Justin Kurzel. The acclaimed director of the likes of Snowtown and Nitram has returned to the festival circuit with two films in one year. His domestic terrorist thriller The Order played at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, but his second film, Ellis Park, is a very different beast.


Ellis Park marks Kurzel’s first fora...

Next Best Picture • 19th October 2024

"THAT CHRISTMAS" - Review

THE STORY – A blizzard hits a seaside town, setting off entwined tales of family, friends, love and loneliness – and Santa making a big mistake.
THE CAST – Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw, Jodie Whittaker & Bill Nighy
THE TEAM – Simon Otto (Director), Richard Curtis & Peter Souter (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
Richard Curtis has created his fair share of mawkish onscreen Christmas moments, but surprisingly, the creator of “Love, Actually” and “About Time” has never made a film expressly for chil...