The Second World War rages across the Pacific, as Commander Houghton (Trevor Howard) does his best to protect his Allied forces during the Japanese invasion. He employs a number of lookouts on a variety of the surrounding islands, to alert the army to the movement of the Japanese military by watching for enemy planes. He…

Kostya (Viktor Kosykh) is a rebellious young boy who finds himself constantly at odds with everyone around him. Presumably to keep him out of trouble, he’s sent to a communist pioneer camp for children, where he gallivants with his fellow campers, much to the chagrin of Comrade Dynin (Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev), the over-strict head counsellor who…

Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson) is a young man who is lost in a world he doesn’t quite understand. He’s the self-professed “King of Staten Island”, based on his upbringing in the titular New York City borough, which he considers to be one of the most singularly uninteresting places in the country, yearning to get out,…

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” – no one truly knows where this popular adage comes from, but it been espoused by countless people across the decades, all of which remarks on the challenges that come with doing comedic work, and how it tends to be the most significant, but worthwhile challenge for any actor,…

Peter (Ladislav Jakim) is an aimless young man who seems to lack any sense of direction. He’s pressured by his parents (Jan Vostrčil and Božena Matušková) to get a job, particularly by his overbearing father, whose belief is that the only person worth any time is a working person and that one can’t truly be…

Louisa (Shirley MacLaine) is the world’s richest woman, she is willing to do absolutely anything to strip herself of that title. She was raised in comfortable poverty, and has always aspired to lead a very simple life, relying on nothing but the bare essentials – but as we see in the first few moments of…

“I do not think my adventure starts with a boy, I think it starts with me” These words appear at the beginning of How to Build a Girl, the ambitious new film by Coky Giedroyc, and her first feature in over twenty years. An audacious comedy in the vein of many similarly-themed coming-of-age stories that…

There’s something quite wonderful about Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Russian: Операция „Ы“ и другие приключения Шурика), a quality that appeals to my interests a lot more than I thought it would. I’ve been gradually exploring the depths of Soviet comedy over the past few years, finding a balance between the many defining masterpieces…

Not too many people speak about Richard Lester, which is surprising considering he is one of cinema’s most interesting directors, but unfortunately fell victim to the fact that, despite making numerous terrific films, never quite had an authorial voice in the same way many of his contemporaries tended to throughout their own careers. The result…

“She ate the bread of life to the last crumb” Madame Berthe (Sylvie) is an elderly woman who has just been left a widow after the death of her husband. Her children are naturally worried about their mother, who had devoted her entire life to her marriage and has suddenly been left without direction. She…