Philip Bagnall

Reviews

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 •

Young Mothers Review: When Kids Have Kids

The Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers is a simple but moving tapestry of the hardships of teenage maternity. The young actresses shine.


The young mothers of the title are five teenagers, all residing in a Liège shelter for pregnant young women. Some have already given birth, while others are approaching their due date, but they support each other by providing company and routine. Their predicament as new mothers is difficult enough, but each one has additional pressures bearing down on them, w...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Legend of the Happy Worker Review

Legend of the Happy Worker is too slight for what it wants to say, but cheery performances and production mean it’s likeable all the same.


The fabled nature of Legend of the Happy Worker is on full display when Goose (Thomas Haden Church) enters a Monument Valley-like landscape in the days of the American west (albeit with a car rather than a horse), stopping at a turtle crossing on the way. He plunges his golden shovel into the ground to begin digging a hole, while a solitary Native on horse...
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...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Il Dono Review: Corrupted Country Living

Michelangelo Frammartino’s debut film Il Dono returns to cinemas, with time only accentuating its capacity to surprise.


Yes, it’s a sparse slice of country life like his later movies, but it’s also angrier and more critical of the rituals and routines that keeps its characters trapped in their isolation.


The opening of Il Dono locates the film perfectly. A nameless old man (Angelo Frammartino, the writer-director’s grandfather) finds his elderly dog ailing on the doorstep of his one-room s...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Dying Film Review: Death Is A Family Affair

Dying, a complex and confident tale of a family grappling with death in all its forms, sees writer-director Matthias Glasner working at the peak of his powers.


Death comes quickly at the end, but Dying takes its time. Writer-director Matthias Glasner is not one to shy away from a long film (A number of his previous movies run well over 2.5 hours), but Dying doesn’t linger for the sake of it. Its three-hour runtime is generous but necessary, as four members of a family see death manifesting in...
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...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

No Sleep Till Review: The Calm Before The Storm

Alexandra Simpson’s debut No Sleep Till is a slow but confidently meditative portrait of people confronting all kinds of adversities.


No Sleep Till continues in the vein of other releases from Omnes Films, the independent film collective that gave us last year’s Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point and unsung gem Eephus. As in those films, the characters in No Sleep Till are contemplating their relationship to a place that could be taken away from them. Tonally, Omnes’ latest release has more in c...
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...
HeadStuff •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

The History of Sound Review: A Familiar Tune

Despite some fine performances, Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound is too unfocused and lacking in bite to stay in the memory.


Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound fits nicely into that role, even casting two stars with experience in this subgenre. When Paul Mescal (All Of Us Strangers) and Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country) meet by a piano in a Boston bar in 1917, you already know that they can’t be together. The only question is how they’ll be parted. The History of Sound adheres to the...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

The Secret Agent Review: On The Run In Brazil

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is a sharp and complex thriller, with a fantastic lead performance from Wagner Moura.


The Brazilian director’s work is as professional as you like, but it has a subversive streak, twisting genre convention on its head. The Secret Agent is no different; it sounds like a thriller, but ends up in all kinds of modes depending on the scene, from hangout movie to horror. This may irritate some, and confuse others, but the exhilaration of the film comes from...
Next Best Picture •

“ORWELL: 2+2=5” - Review

THE STORY – Explores the life and career of George Orwell, particularly the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
THE CAST – Damian Lewis
THE TEAM – Raoul Peck (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 119 Minutes
Big Brother is everywhere. This is not just the premise of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” it’s also a statement of fact. The ideas contained in Orwell’s book have entered the public consciousness with an efficacy and efficiency that the authoritarian leader Big Brother himse...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

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 •

Left-Handed Girl Review: It’s Not Mother’s Day

With energy and empathy, Shih-Tsing Chou tells a tale of women’s hard graft in Left-Handed Girl, a triumph for its co-writer/director and cast.


However, her accompanying daughters, late-teen dropout I-Ann (Shih-yuan Ma) and precocious little I-Jing (Nina Yeh) are the ones who will learn that such moves are driven by the grind of capitalistic labor, and the oft-stifling bonds of tradition. Such things can be made to work in a person’s favour, but on the surface this matriarchal family unit see...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Bono: Stories of Surrender Film Review

The U2 frontman proves an inscrutable subject in Andrew Dominik’s slick but unrevealing concert confessional Bono: Stories of Surrender.


As renowned for his work as an anti-poverty campaigner as he is for his distinctive tenor voice, Bono tries hard to work for others, and yet can’t shake off the stench of ego. A lavish lifestyle, aided in part by clever accounting and tax shelters, explains some of the antagonism towards him. Then again, many an Irish person will tell you begrudgery is a nat...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Arco Film Review: Looking to the Future with Hope

Arco may not be very original in its look or plot, but it brims with potent emotionality and a refreshing sense of optimism.


A young girl living in a 2075 filled with hovercars and robot manual labor chases a moving rainbow to find a visitor from the even more distant future lying at the end of it. Arco walks a fine line between sci-fi and fantasy, but it works.


It’s easy to spot the influences on an animated movie; the very style of a given film is the greatest hint as to whom the directo...
Load More