Philip Bagnall

Reviews

Loud And Clear Reviews •

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 •

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 •

The Rule of Jenny Pen Review: Elder Abuse Horror

Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow are terrific in The Rule of Jenny Pen, James Ashcroft’s playful and intelligent tale of abuse and deceit.


Such castings are also recognition that these scripts offer some of the most upfront thematic tests to actor and audience alike. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, two garlanded old hands jump into an existential nightmare with effectively creepy and oddly moving results. Kiwi writer-director James Ashcroft feels no need to move the story from his and source author O...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Cleaner Film review: Needs Cleaning Up

Cleaner wastes some good actors, a fine director and a meagre budget on a script that shamelessly rips off Die Hard at every turn.


That extends to the cast and crew; there’s just no passion or energy to anyone’s efforts here.


To be fair to the filmmaking team behind Cleaner, you gotta make bank. For example, after years of exploring galaxies far, far away, Daisy Ridley has segued into more interesting smaller-scale fare, like Sometimes I Think About Dying and Young Woman and the Sea. These...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Suze Review: A Full Heart With an Empty Nest

Suze is a sharp and charming story of a woman finding meaning in unlikely places. Two game lead performances deliver the laughs.


Perhaps the freshness of Suze lies in its setting. Tropes of comedies (Teen comedies especially) often come from societal conventions. While most comedies aiming for mainstream connection borrow from their American kin, this is a Canadian production through and through. Shot in Ontario, and starring mostly Canadians (Watkins being the exception), Suze is refreshingl...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

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...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Time Passages Review: Love Lost to Time & Covid-19

Kyle Henry’s Time Passages gently honours the filmmaker’s mother, while knowingly exploring how we interact with our own families’ pasts.


Chicago-based filmmaker Kyle Henry was caught in this dilemma. His dementia-stricken mother Elaine was in a care facility in Texas, and thus he could only visit her via remote video calls. All this happened while he was in the middle of collating images, home video and artifacts from his family archive. He blends these items, his recollections of his mother...
HeadStuff •

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...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Eternal You Review: The Virtual Stairway to Heaven

Eternal You wants to warn of the dangers of human-aping AI, but is largely a toothless exercise in headshaking, with little interrogative instinct.


Well, the future is here, and on the evidence of Eternal You, our interest in questioning technology has waned to a point where even a purported critique comes with the slick filed-down edges of a corporate advertisement. (Speaking of which, this writer is being subjected to a glut of cinema adverts for a certain search engine’s AI function with i...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Girls Town Review: Young Women Ahead of Their Time

Nearly three decades on from its debut, the re-release of Girls Town shows this coming-of-age drama is more potent than ever.


Jim McKay’s Sundance hit gets a 4K restoration and re-release for an audience that will doubtlessly be receptive to its message.


Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is a busy actress of late. The last year alone saw her in The Deliverance, Exhibiting Forgiveness and Nickel Boys. All this is a long way from her modest but sturdy debut here. The film opens with her character Nikki...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Laws of Man Review: (Federal) Agents of Chaos

Despite some charismatic cast members, and a final-act reveal that beggars belief, Laws of Man can’t overcome its budgetary or narrative limitations.


As time goes on, Laws Of Man mixes conventions of Westerns and cop procedurals with a healthy dollop of conspiracy theory. Needless to say, subtlety is not in its wheelhouse.


It’s 1963 in rural Nevada. The aftermath of the shack fire heralds the arrival of two U.S. Marshals (who are dressed as FBI agents for some reason, though they often poi...
HeadStuff •

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 •

The American Review: A Dance of Blood, Sweat and Tears

The American (Joika) is nothing new as a biopic, but Talia Ryder sells the sacrifices one has to make for their art.


Ballet dancers must be frustrated with the depictions of their art in popular culture. The dance is genteel and precious on the surface, but the practice of ballet is punishing, requiring years of training and a great deal of sacrifice. The American captures the pain required to make it in the world of ballet better than any other film on the subject. Every drop of blood and sw...
HeadStuff •

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 •

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 •

Ellis Park Review: A Man On A Mission

Ellis Park is a charming profile of Bad Seeds maestro Warren Ellis, even if fans know most of what it has to say already. 


Parallels will inevitably be drawn between this film and the numerous documentaries that have been made about Ellis’ friend and collaborator Nick Cave. The likes of 20,000 Days on Earth and This Much I Know To Be True are esoteric in their approach to profiling Cave, and Ellis Park can’t help but look conventional by comparison. However, this does make it a good introduct...
Next Best Picture •

"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...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Hard Truths Review: A Late Leigh Stunner

Mike Leigh delivers a raw and timely domestic drama in Hard Truths. A fiery Marianne Jean-Baptiste leads a superb cast.


She might be named for a delicate flower, but Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is anything but. From the moment she wakes up (usually from a nightmare), she’s on edge all day. Finding fault in everyone and everything she encounters, she lashes out at anyone who does even the slightest thing to irritate her Shop staff, medical professionals, even the birds on her driveway; no-o...
Next Best Picture •

"THE SUMMER BOOK" - Review

THE STORY – Follows the inspirational tale of a young girl and her grandmother spending a summer on a small, uninhabited island in the Gulf of Finland.
THE CAST – Emily Matthews, Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Pekka Strang & Sophia Heikkilä
THE TEAM – Charlie McDowell (Director) & Robert Jones (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
It so often happens that the most unassuming works that elicit the strongest emotions. Finnish author Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was adept at cre...
Next Best Picture •

"JOY" - Review

THE STORY – Set in the 1960s and 1970s, a nurse (McKenzie), a visionary scientist (Norton), and an innovative surgeon (Nighy) work to develop the first “test-tube baby.”
THE CAST – Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton & Joanna Scanlan
THE TEAM – Ben Taylor (Director) & Jack Thorne (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 minutes
Childbirth has been at the forefront of several significant releases this year. More specifically, the fears around pregnancy have crept from subtext into text in some fil...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

One to One: John & Yoko Review - Plays The Hits

One to One: John & Yoko is an affectionate look at the couple’s activism, but there’s nothing new here for Lennon devotees.


Like Daytime Revolution, One to One: John & Yoko is primarily focused on a single event. On 30th August 1972, Lennon performed his only publicly announced concerts after the breakup of the Beatles, namely a benefit gig for the Willowbrook State Hospital for disabled children in Staten Island. The footage from the concert is as enthralling and well-produced as you’d expec...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

The End Review: The Beginning of Something Wonderful

Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterful post-apocalyptic musical The End soars on gorgeous filmmaking, confidence and raw emotion.


To complete an unlikely trilogy, we get The End. This could have had the campest approach to a post-apocalyptic story this side of Roland Emmerich, but it comes from a director who has turned unlikely displays of artistic expression into masterpieces before, and thankfully, he’s done it again.


Joshua Oppenheimer’s career as a filmmaker rests almost entirely on the backs...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Watership Down Review: Still Burrowing Into Your Nightmares

With commitment to the realities of the natural world, the passage of time has done little to water down Watership Down’s fierce power.


From E.B. White to Roald Dahl, the best children’s classics know to instill some measure of fear in their readers/viewers. Adams imparted his own concerns for animal welfare to his daughters via stories of uprooted and hunted rabbits in the hills near their Hampshire home, which eventually became his 1972 multi-million bestselling novel. The tale of the intre...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Endurance Review: Shackleton’s story brought to life

Endurance is a tale of incredible courage from long ago brought to life, albeit with a dual narrative that gets in the way of the main story.


The story of the Endurance fits nicely into the oeuvre of husband and wife filmmakers Chin and Vasarhelyi. After last year’s Nyad, which took a tale of achievement in the face of insurmountable odds and compressed it into a cookiecutter biopic template, they return to the documentary form that won them an Academy Award for Free Solo. That film boasted p...
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