Philip Bagnall

About Me

I am a London-based film critic, open to new outlets for my work.

My current outlets:

- Loud and Clear Reviews

- Next Best Picture

- Headstuff

- FILMHOUNDS Magazine

- Scannain

I also contribute to The 250 Podcast.

I am available for articles, reviews, interviews and festivals. I have previously attended and covered:

- Cannes Film Festival

- Venice Film Festival

- BFI London Film Festival,

- Dublin International Film Festival.

Member, Film Critics Association UK

If any journalists, editors, producers etc. like what they see here, get in touch:

Email: cynicalfilm@gmail.com

Bluesky/Instagram/Letterboxd: @CynicalFilm

Recent Work

HeadStuff •

Dead Man’s Wire movie review | Dog Day Afterthought - HeadStuff

In his acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Paul Thomas Anderson cited the phenomenal quintet of films that made up the nominees for that same award in 1975. He mooted that their shared quality shows that the films this year needn’t compete amongst one another for attention and acclaim (though anyone who saw Frankenstein or F1 knows that simply isn’t true). The rebellious spirit of the likes of Dog Day Afternoon informed Anderson’s vision in One Battle After Another, but Dea...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

The Love That Remains (Film Review) – Love On Ice

The Icelandics were always bound to have a unique and quirky sense of humour. Alien to North Americans, but just too far adrift from the rest of Scandinavia, Iceland lies far enough removed from everywhere to evolve an artistic and comedic sensibility all its own. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that its process of evolution was entirely convergent. The Love That Remains might play as too wry for some, but the ideas it touches on and the wicked humour on display have universal appeal. A...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros (Film Review) – In-Depth And Delicious

Dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant is often reserved as an experience, something to be savoured because the judges from the tyre company deemed it worthy. Since the three-star hierarchy was established by the Guide Michelin in 1931, few establishments have managed to garner the illustrious full three stars. Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros is an attempt to show the ambition and effort that goes into earning and maintaining such a reputation, as the Troisgros family continue to run three restau...
HeadStuff •

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Movie Review | Rose Byrne Is One Tough Mother! - HeadStuff

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens on a close-up of Linda’s (Rose Byrne) face, and the camera is reluctant to leave her for most of the film that follows. Mothers are often put in an uncomfortable gaze by people who aren’t in their shoes, and Mary Bronstein’s brilliantly paranoid fable manifests that discomfort in terrifyingly vivid detail. Walk a mile in someone’s shoes to know them, they say. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You runs a marathon in Linda’s unsupportive flats while having a panic attack....
HeadStuff •

Little Amélie or The Character of Rain | Dazzling Animation Treats Kids With Intelligence And Respect - HeadStuff

Animation is so often demoted to the realm of ‘children’s entertainment’, but Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is different. It knows it’s aimed at kids, and tells its story from a child’s point of view, but that doesn’t stop it from engaging with loftier ideas, centred on spiritual and human connection. In its opening sequence, a child narrates the story of her birth, and posits the idea that she is nothing less than God. Any parent of a newborn will tell you that their child becomes the...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Review

Director Nia DaCosta follows Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later with The Bone Temple, a leaner, smarter, nastier sequel, the best of the franchise since the original.


Both were potent on those terms, but 28 Years Later saw returning director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland try to do too much. It proved more effective at its musings on the inevitability of time and death than when grappling with the aftermaths of Covid-19 and Brexit.


Watching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, it’s clear that d...
HeadStuff •

Hamnet Movie Review | Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s Sublimely Sad Shakespeare Story - HeadStuff

Hamnet opens on Agnes (Jessie Buckley) lying amongst the raised roots of a mighty tree in a forest glade. Enveloped in the greenery and birdsong, the image evokes memories of Millais’ painting of Ophelia drowning after Hamlet has driven her insane. The evocation is apt, as Agnes is more commonly known as Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare. In this image, director Chloé Zhao lays down her intent. This story is something more elemental and deeply felt than the usual biopic. Hamnet isn’...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Craig Brewer on Song Sung Blue: Interview

Watch and read our interview with director Craig Brewer, who tells us about Song Sung Blue, Lightning & Thunder and Neil Diamond ahead of the film’s theatrical release.


Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman), a middle-aged Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic, makes ends meet with a job as a mechanic, but he has bigger dreams. He moonlights as “Lighting”, a cover artist on the local circuit in Milwaukee, but with little success. When he meets Patsy Cline impersonator Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson) at a gig...
HeadStuff •

Marty Supreme movie review | Timothée Chalamet's ping-pong epic is a total smash! - HeadStuff

The fallacy at the heart of the American Dream is that working hard and nurturing one’s own talent will guarantee success. Marty Supreme sees poor Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) learn that this isn’t necessarily so. From the opening scenes, it’s readily apparent that Mauser isn’t mousy, his silver tongue helping him sell shoes to punters like ice to an Inuit. He may be able to flog clogs, but his larger dream of sporting glory is gonna take more than a quick turn of phrase to achieve.


After...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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...
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