Sisu is simple, 91 minutes of gritty action. Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander has a track record of pulpy thrillers, namely Rare Exports: A Christmas Story and Big Game. With Sisu, the experience has been pruned to an unpretentious bloodbath. It is a knowing throwback to the gleeful adult action of the 1970s and 80s, with its chapter titles ('Chapter 2: The Nazis') and bombastic score (by Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä).
Sisu untranslatably means relentlessness, we are informed at the…
Legacy of Lies teams martial arts star Scott Adkins with writer-director Adrian Bol, a Dutch film-maker with a handful of shorts and low-budget thrillers under his belt. Adkins plays an MI6 agent, Martin Baxter, dragged out of retirement when his daughter is threatened, and I was primed for another genre showcase for Adkins' MMA and tongue-in-cheek charisma.
Legacy of Lies is more sombre than that, foregrounding Adkins' dramatic skills with espionage cat-and-mouse business enlivened with brief action setpieces. We open…
Raging Bull is a consensus classic that never sat quite as high as Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy in my personal Scorsese ranking. It is a fascinating 'warts-and-all' biopic for sure though, telling the tale of ambitious boxer Jake LaMotta and his grim professional and personal journey. It paints him as an intriguing, exceptionally unappealing character, with Robert De Niro offering another transformative, layered performance. De Niro read LaMotta's memoir while filming The Godfather Part II, and persuaded…
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was meant to be the next big event in the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe, but ended up as an unprecedented (albeit profitable) flop for the studio. It struggled even to match the hauls of previous Ant-Man installments, and those were never the biggest hitters of the MCU. Why was this? General superhero fatigue? A renouncing of the small stakes that made Ant-Man enjoyable in the first place, in favour of yet another apocalyptic threat? An…
