Matt Glasby

“It’s like a sauna. Furnace. You could fry an egg on my stomach. Oooooohhhhh”

There’s a reason it’s up for an Oscar.

The problem – and it’s a biggie – is one of timing.

“Plunges us into a maelstrom of fame so monstrous only Michael Jackson could relate”.

Bad writing lets down a good-as-ever Colin Firth, writes Matt Glasby.

Matt Glasby on the access-all-areas documentary that attempts to get to the bottom of such a confounding man.

All expectation, no eruption.

Feels like an adaptation of an austere 1900s book that’s been lost to the ages.

The exuberant Scot speaks to us about JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE and her other massive projects.

What really stays with you is the extraordinary, often handheld, camerawork and Baker’s powerful sense of place.

Jude Law is no stranger to playing the role of Pompous Asshole (see Dom Hemingway or Contagion for good examples). In Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, however, he is straight-up evil as Vortigern. Flicks’ Matt Glasby joined Law around an English round table to find out more about being a villain, working […]

Guy Ritchie’s spent his career playing in the sandpit with quintessentially English characters of both his own design and, more recently, those of others (Sherlock Holmes, and yes, we’re going to half-count The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as it’s one big Bond riff). Hearing Ritchie was tackling a new King Arthur film was therefore hardly surprising, […]

Having received – excuse the pun – a bit of a panning elsewhere, Stephen Gaghan’s lively rise-and-fall drama arrives on these shores as soiled goods. Inspired by true events, it’s the tale of one (made-up) man’s obsessive search for gold. But the real story seems to be star Matthew McConaughey’s elusive search for another Oscar. […]

For an Oscar hopeful, writer/director Kenneth (You Can Count On Me, Margaret) Lonergan’s wry, wrenching drama begins in about as mundane a manner as can be. In a role earmarked for Matt Damon, who produces, Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a glum Boston janitor for whom beer and bar fights provide life’s only fleeting pleasures. […]

One day Dennis Villeneuve will make a masterpiece. Incendies (2010) came close as dammit. Prisoners (2013) started strong but twisted when it should have stuck. Enemy (2013) was far too esoteric (read pretentious). And Sicario (2015) was superbly crafted but just shy of world-shaking. For its first 30 minutes this cerebral sci-fi, adapted by Eric […]

The so called “grey dollar” – not to be confused with the pink one – is something of a cinematic growth market, as the proliferation of Red and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fare attests. Similarly talent-heavy but thrill-light is John Miller’s genial UK geri-com. Written by, of all people, TV DIY doyen Nick Knowles, it gives the brilliant Bernard […]

Rushed to the screen to capitalise on the success of Paula Hawkins’ 2015 source novel, The Girl On The Train appears to have been written on one, juddering to its destination faster than the speed of sense. Tormented by the picture-perfect lives she glimpses during her morning commute – including her ex-husband Justin Theroux and […]

When it comes to comedy, there’s no such thing as a graceful retirement. More than a decade after the (note perfect) conclusion of The Office on TV, the movie debut of Slough’s most excruciating middle manager is a mixed blessing. Attempting to launch his career as a rock star – a subject close to the heart of […]

The wish-fulfilment film is one of the trickier genres to grasp. Make the reality too tough and the wish won’t take flight; but make the fulfilment part too easy and it just looks like lies. Master of the bitter-sweet musical, having made the glorious Once and the surprisingly non-shit Begin Again, Irish writer/director John Carney […]

The mechanics of a happy marriage are subtly put to the scalpel in writer/director Andrew Haigh’s measured drama, an ever-so-British response to the likes of Amour. Based on David Constantine’s short story In Another Country, it finds Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) living out a contented retirement in the countryside and preparing to […]

A loose remake of forgotten 1969 French thriller La Piscine, I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino’s eroticised drama is best thought of as a sort of Euro-centric Sexy Beast – Sexy Beasts, perhaps. Both feature Brits abroad disturbed by force-of-nature guests; and both are better as portrayals of unsettling group dynamics than as thrillers. On the Italian island […]