Philip Bagnall

FILMHOUNDS Magazine • 4th December 2025

L'Atalante (4K Review)

The legacy of director Jean Vigo (1905 -1934) stretches far beyond his meagre oeuvre. His tragic death from tuberculosis at the age of 29 has always added a layer of sadness to his films, as well as regret that he never got to make more. However, any number of revisits to his only feature film L'Atalante show that the sadness and regret are justified. Like Charles Laughton with The Night of the Hunter, it should have been one of the great debuts at the start of a long career, but it still stands...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 24th November 2025

Interview: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl

We interview Left-Handed Girl writer-director Shih-Ching Tsou about her creative process, her approaches to casting and shooting in her native Taiwan.


In Left-Handed Girl, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) takes her children, teenager I-Ann (Shih-yuan Ma) and little moppet I-Jing (Nina Yeh), to her hometown of Taipei to set up a noodle stall, but their new home and circumstances bring challenges and bitter truths. As I-Jing contemplates her place in her family and new city, her grandfather’s admonition of...

HeadStuff • 13th November 2025

The Running Man movie review | Edgar Wright's flashy remake runs out of puff long before the finish line - HeadStuff

Glen Powell is making all the right moves to become an old-school, bona fide movie star. Even if we’re not making them anymore, he’ll almost certainly be one. An appearance by Tom Cruise, the real running man, at Powell’s latest world premiere feels like an endorsement in that direction. This is in spite of Powell’s choices of scripts, which often involve him obscuring his looks for the plot. Powell is front and centre in The Running Man, which forces his charisma into the faces of his audience....

Loud And Clear Reviews • 23rd October 2025

Kenny Dalglish Review: Long Live The King

Asif Kapadia’s Kenny Dalglish is a heartfelt tribute to the Scotland and Liverpool legend, albeit lacking the bite of his best work.


This lad from Glasgow who made good on the promise he showed from his youth seems an unlikely subject for a documentary from Asif Kapadia. The Academy Award-winning director has cornered the market on cautionary tales, but he locates enough tragedy amongst the talent in Kenny Dalglish to play to his strengths, and a compelling (if unremarkable) portrait emerges....

Loud And Clear Reviews • 17th October 2025

The Death of Bunny Munro Review

Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro comes to our screens with two compelling lead performances and a smart balance between smut and sentiment.


As made clear in the first two episodes of the new mini-series that were screened at the BFI London Film Festival, this story of a man addicted to sex, alcohol and general hedonism is tailor-made for an actor who wants to shed a nice boy image, but who also wants to retain the charm and mutate it into something more primal and dangerous.


Smith is f...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 16th October 2025

Anemone Review: A Day-Lewis Family Affair

An overqualified cast and a beautiful look can’t lift Ronan Day-Lewis’ Anemone above its obvious script and direction.


A number of relationships are at work in Anemone, but at its core are two brothers. Jem (Sean Bean) journeys from his home in Sheffield to a sparse and barely habitable woodland. Deep amongst the trees lies an old cottage, with just enough comforts to house Jem’s brother, the reclusive Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis). The crux of the film’s publicity (and its whole reason for existing...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 12th October 2025

Reflection in a Dead Diamond Review: A Fun Gem

Reflection in a Dead Diamond is Cattet and Forzani’s most dynamic and fun film yet, spoofing and honouring the many genres the writers-directors love.


From the first scene, husband-and-wife filmmaker duo Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet promise that their latest film is full of the sex appeal and wit that defines their features to date. However, this one also has tuxedos, ninjas and comic book panels. The directors are always playful, but they’ve never been this fun.


Since before their feat...

HeadStuff • 24th September 2025

One Battle After Another movie review | Paul Thomas Anderson masterfully reckons with This American Moment - HeadStuff

Paul Thomas Anderson is a historian. Over his nine films to date, he has charted the 20th century with remarkable insight. His history has been out of order, but the points he makes are legitimate. The early 1900s reflected the late 2000s with the pursuit of oil spurred on by corrupted religion (There Will Be Blood). The 1950s saw the cult of personality take root in men whose own personas were destroyed in war (The Master) while the rest of the world rebuilt itself in the self-important image o...

HeadStuff • 4th September 2025

A Writer’s Pride Leads To Hoffman’s Height | Capote at 20 - HeadStuff

Capote is a black-and-white film, but it’s made in colour. Despite its late-1950s rural American setting, Capote has to be in colour when there’s such a colourful character at its core. In his time, Truman Capote (1924 – 1984) was as notable for his flamboyance as for his writing. He is best known now for his contributions to the New Journalism school of writing, and his masterpiece non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, but the personality that won him so much of his notoriety was both help and hindr...

HeadStuff • 22nd August 2025

The Life of Chuck movie review | sappy sentimental nonsense is a new kind of Stephen King horror - HeadStuff

Watching The Life of Chuck, one suspects that Mike Flanagan has some leftover issues from his teenage years to resolve. If he wasn’t a teen maths whizz and a member of the high school dance club, he should have been, given how cool his newest film insists these phenomena are. Of course, he’s leaning into his own interests as a writer/director here, making his third adaptation based on the works of Stephen King. As indulgent as Doctor Sleep was in entertaining King’s complaints about Kubrick’s ve...

Loud And Clear Reviews • 30th July 2025

The Naked Gun Review: Neeson Honours Nielsen

Led by a bravura Liam Neeson, The Naked Gun hilariously brings back spoofing that’s been missing from our screens for too long.


The Austin Powers series petered out over two decades ago, and even the horrendous Scary Movies came to a merciful end. The makers of 2025’s The Naked Gun have spotted a gap in the market, and deliver a well-timed, solidly made and (most importantly) rib-tickling good time.


The hapless but hilarious Lieutenant Frank Drebin was the defining role for the late Leslie...

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...