Oscar Isaac

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is good, but conflicted

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 19th December 2019

    There’s no denying that Star Wars: The Last Jedi created a massive disturbance in the force, as if a million voices suddenly cried out in entitled outrage and were suddenly empowered to act like total asshats on Twitter. All Rian Johnson really did was evolve his film beyond the tropes, cliches and traditions that have become the hallmarks of every episode in the saga until that point. Bury the past - or literally burn it down - and move on. Forget the old and make way for the new, otherwise how can there be any progress? After all, "we are," muses Yoda, "what they grow beyond". But if that proved a divisive move, then what JJ Abrams does with this final instalment is equally controversial: ignore that new approach entirely and return to the safe familiarity of the old template. There’s important plot development, of course, but it is housed within a return to the brand adherence and fan service that The Force Awakens originally offered. Skywalker rises, but Episode 9 of 9 simply stays on target.

  • Review: Triple Frontier is quite literally a miserable slog

    Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 27th March 2019

    Grrr, men! All muscles and sweat, guns 'n' grit, sports and spunk. But sometimes emotions too. Manly men, rappelling from helicopters, growing a beard. Laying our souls bare to one another in a series of grunts. Real men can communicate using open palm hand gestures to navigate through the streets of life son. Drop and give me fifty no-scopes. Men are complicated contradictions: chiselled yet indefinable; poets and filthy bog creatures; an army of one yet no man is an army. Caps. The only thing that can understand a real man is an even more realer man. Grr! Bloody men!!

  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 12th December 2017

    If I could have had a small, green, wise mentor teach me the ways of online film criticism, he probably would have instilled in me a respect for the balance between objectivity and subjectivity. He would have told me that uninformed criticism is what binds the entire internet and that I should always try to be mindful of hype. But, halfway through my training, I would have still no doubt run off unprepared to face what is easily my greatest weakness: Star Wars.

  • X-Men: Apocalypse

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 19th May 2016

    Forgive me for sounding like I'm on the company payroll, but have Marvel movies ruined superhero movies for everyone else? I fear they have. The Marvel Cinematic Universe made its own space in the superhero sphere; it owns the area marked 'fun'. DC, as a countermeasure to all the lousy fun everyone was enjoying, staked their claim on the 'serious' space; heroes with grim faces carved out of rock, pre-tantrum lip-wobble expressions lashed with rain. Where does this leave the X-Men? I'm sure I don't know anymore, because X-Men: Apocalypse attempts to be all things to all people and ends up being neither overtly fun or remotely serious, just entirely ridiculous. It feels like a superhero movie back from when no one really knew what that was supposed to mean, or, as a friend of mine put it so perfectly: "It's like a shit superhero movie from the nineties".

  • A Most Violent Year

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 23rd January 2015

    How to make it in America: fairly well-worn ground for films, and yet still they keep coming. This immigrant's tale from JC Chandor is more than that, though. A largely non-violent study of how the (mostly) law-abiding react when faced with violence, and of whether turning the other cheek is a workable - or even desirable - strategy.

  • The Two Faces Of January

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 15th May 2014

    Now I don't want you to be alarmed or make any sudden movements, but I've read the book on which this film is based. Like, all the way through. I sort of remember it, too. Which is why I told the guys they could keep their X-Men and their Godzillas, because this week I be Highsmithin'. No, I wasn't invited to the other screenings, but I don't see how that's relevant.

  • #LFF2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

    Movie Review | Neil Alcock | 16th October 2013

    "If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song," mutters Inside Llewyn Davis' titular muso between performances from a dimly-lit Greenwich Village stage. Those might just be the folkiest words ever uttered, but while they're perfectly accurate, they could just as easily be applied to the Coen brothers' best work. The reassuring familiarity of the Coenverse's unique characters, patois and situations, which sit at ninety degrees to reality, is one of modern cinema's greatest pleasures, and the knowledge that they could take you anywhere is never less than tantalising. Inside Llewyn Davis delivers that old magic in spades, and includes an award-worthy performance from a cat to boot. What's not to love?

  • The Bourne Legacy

    Movie Review | Ali | 11th August 2012

    Despite its lineage, The Bourne Legacy has received a frosty reception from critics thus far and has had an almost completely anonymous marketing presence – rather than dynamically burst into cinemas next week, rolling up its poster and ramming it down audiences' throats, it shuffles in apologetically to be met with highly suspicious glares. This is entirely unnecessary, because while Legacy couldn't ever hope to match the Paul Greengrass/Matt Damon movies for sheer punch and propulsion, it's as close to replicating them as you could expect, and marks another excellent entry into the Bourneography.

  • Drive

    Movie Review | Ali | 18th September 2011

    That Ryan Gosling: so hot right now. It's easy to forget he started his career as a Disney Mouseketeer in the same stable as Britney, Christina and Justin, but today Baby Goose finds himself with two critically-acclaimed movies out on the same day and a Clooney Oscar-grabber still to come. Ladies, if you thought he was hot stuff in Crazy Stupid Love as a spray-tanned, six-packed womaniser, then prepare for your ovaries to implode when you see him play a strong-and-silent getaway driver with a penchant for deep, meaningful gazing sessions. "Hey girl," he seems to say. "I'm capable of astonishing violence, but I'll make a good makeshift father for your son, too." Make no mistake: he's husband material.