Movie & TV Show HD

Often the most interesting thing about a movie is the thing they don't want you paying attention to. When you're setting up an extreme scenario that you want to play around with, usually the easy thing to do is to set up an environment where that scenario seems reasonable; there's a reason why crime rules the streets in every Death Wish movie. So to have everyone constantly logged into a virtual world in Ready Player One , the real world has to be a crapsack. But why? Movies have always struggled to make virtual worlds interesting. Movies themselves are a virtual world we willingly enter; add another layer to that and you run the risk of the audience feeling too far removed from the story. Inception made it work by having the layers of removal be part of the story; The Matrix set the bar impossibly high by making the virtual world the only place where the characters could be fully human. And here? It's important because that's where all the cool stuff is. The ori...

Mary Magdalene  is a quiet and sensitive film about a radical woman. Lacking the violent bombast of most biblical filmic narratives, and refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, it's a film that may perplex or underwhelm impatient audiences. But it's interesting precisely because of this quietness, and for the way it allows its central character, Mary (Rooney Mara, etherial and serious), a spiritual journey that's valid and plausible, whether or not you can believe in the mumbling Jesus  as the son of God or merely a gifted guru ahead of his times. This is a film that arguably allows both possibilities to exist side by side. We first meet Mary as an empathic young woman living in a small fishing village where she doesn’t fit in with her traditional male-dominated Jewish family. She doesn’t want to marry or bear children and yearns for something intangible. Her independences leaves her open to accusations of demon possession and there are moments of real danger ...

Tomb Raider is an old-fashioned film, and not just because a large chunk of it takes place in a thousand year-old crypt: there’s next to nothing going on in this largely unambitious action-adventure that you couldn’t see in a movie twenty (forty?) years ago. Well, maybe one thing: at a time when the idea that simply taking another culture’s relics is a little dubious, the new Tomb Raider goes out of its way to present grave-robbing in a socially acceptable light. This time around the ones actually robbing the tomb are the bad guys, the tomb is Japanese (relatively safe to pillage culturally speaking) and it's also pretty much a death trap the Japanese didn’t want anywhere near their country anyway. So with that safely taken care of, we’re free to enjoy the tomb-raiding clichés – of which there are many, and this gleefully includes all of them – under the steady leadership of Alicia Vikander, who as Lara Croft delivers a performance that gives just the right amoun...

It's International Women's Day. You can go elsewhere to find reams of appalling statistics and analysis telling us just how far we've got to go before there are equal opportunities for women behind the camera and in front of it. This inequality extends, of course, to women film critics, commentators and scholars. I'm not here to talk about that. Me, I'm struggling to stay in the game.  Freelance film writing is poorly paid, sporadic, and takes far longer to do properly than most people realise. Like most journalism, it's a struggling profession (if film reviewing ever was a profession) and most of us, men and women, do it for the love of it. I reckon I spend 20 hours a month watching films for a one-hour unpaid podcast, Hell is for Hyphenates . It's a fun gig, I enjoy working with my hilarious co-host, Lee Zachariah, and it stretches me to watch both old and new films. I know how lucky I am to be able to afford keep writing about film while I'm working ...

Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is the prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet until an on-stage accident (note: not an accident) ends her career. Her options to support her ill mother (Joely Richardson) rapidly narrow; working for her sleazy security chief uncle (an extremely Putin-like Matthias Schoenaerts) becomes the only way to keep from being thrown out onto the street. Of course, once she agrees to his offer she’s dropped into a nightmare where the only way to stay alive is to become a Sparrow, a spy trained to use sex as a weapon against the enemies of the state – enemies like CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who’s been booted out of Russia for blowing his cover. Nate is a spy who cares too much, and when the high level mole he was handling won’t make contact with anyone else he’s sent back to Europe to re-establish contact – and Dominika is sent to “make contact” with him.   You're seeing this for Jennifer Lawrence, and fortunately she...

Lets get this out of the way: As the awards season gathers pace, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut  Lady Bird  is in severe danger of being overhyped. Be warned, it’s the kind of modest, indie coming-of-age story we’ve seen a million times. Set in a vaguely nostalgic 2002 and 2003, it’s episodic and stylistically simple, with a guitar-heavy soundtrack. It hits the familiar beats: Prom Night, painful conflicts with parents and falling outs with best friends; the pursuit of popularity, the loss of virginity and the wisdom that comes when grand dreams crunch up against reality. But  Lady Bird  is written, directed and performed with such tenderness, spiky humour and attention to detail, that it’s a delight to behold. Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a dramatic and somewhat pretentious 17-year-old who insists on being called by the name ‘Lady Bird’. Her kind-hearted father, Larry (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts), is a computer programme...

The introduction of then-prince T'Challa (Chadwick Bozeman) to the Marvel cinematic universe in Captain America: Civil War was the high point of the film. That wasn't really a surprise: one of the things Marvel does best is introduce new characters to its ever-expanding universe, and the already-announced Black Panther movie already had a lot riding on it. But that scene in Civil War held out the promise of two separate things; the Black Panther movie we now have only delivers on one. With T'Challa's father killed in Civil War , the young prince is clearly next in line to the throne of secretive and super-advanced African nation of Wakanda. It turns out to be a very long line, as it's roughly forty-five minutes into the film before the story finally kicks into gear. Not that what happens before T'Challa goes on the hunt for resource-plundering bad guy Klaw (Andy Serkis with a gun arm) isn't interesting or important; the lengthy sequence where T'Chall...