Viola Davis

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Widows delivers an effective, grief-stricken social drama with thrills

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 16th October 2018

    Steve McQueen’s dramatically weighty take on the heist movie genre starts with a blistering opening scene. We see masked robbers fleeing their crime mid-pursuit, but only from inside the back of their getaway van. With a fixed position looking out through the transit’s rear, its broken doors scraping and sparking on the road as police cars and traffic crash and pile-up in the trail of the gang’s escape, we cut to each of the members in moments of domesticity from earlier that day - Liam Neeson passionately kissing Viola Davis in bed, Jon Bernthal prodding at the black eye adorning Elizabeth Debicki’s face, kisses goodbye, arguments in stores - until finally a chaotic shootout leaves the gang and their van exploded in flames. McQueen’s intent is clear: from the physical chaos on the roads to the emotional distress at home, these robbers are leaving a lot of devastation in their wake.

  • Get On Up

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 20th November 2014

    Pop star biopics don't really work, do they? They love to take great, heavy-handed pains to hint at the inspiration behind the subject's most famous work, like a whole film comprising Forrest Gump telling John Lennon how in China the people have no possessions, and no religion too. Get On Up, the story of James Brown, isn't quite as guilty of this as most, and boasts a standout lead performance by Chadwick Boseman, but by Christ, its script is funky, and not in a good way.

  • Prisoners

    Movie Review | Neil Alcock | 20th September 2013

    On a list of fantasy dads, Hugh Jackman's got to rate pretty highly. There can't be many actors who you'd want to drop you off at school, teach you to shave or come round and fix your boiler. Clooney? Too pretty. Downey Jr? Too easily distracted. Cruise? Too weird. But even though he's younger than them all, Jackman's got "ideal dad" written all over him, which makes him enormously watchable in the role of protective pop in Prisoners. That is until he transforms into a screaming demon of furious, misguided, hammer-wielding vengeance, at which point I'll take back my actual dad thanks very much. He might not be Hugh Jackman but at least he doesn't perforate your eardrums every time he opens his mouth.

  • Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 13th February 2012

    September 11th, 2001. Pretty bad day, overall. But ten years on, 9/11 is beginning to take its place alongside the Vietnam War in inspiring a genre of American cinema in its own right, and the story of how the day unfolded and its aftermath resonated is taking shape through filmmakers' eyes. The wounds are still raw, but while there might have been cries of "Too soon!" when Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass released World Trade Center and United 93 respectively in 2006, in relative terms these guys waited longer than Coppola did before Apocalypse Now. Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close couldn't be accused of insensitivity: it's the first film I've seen to treat 9/11 as a historical event and look at the loss suffered in retrospect, rather than put you right in the middle of the clouds of debris or a doomed aeroplane.

  • Law Abiding Citizen

    Movie Review | Phyllis | 25th November 2009

    What happens when you throw Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, insinuated rape, gruesome revenge killings and over-the-top action sequences together into one over-long courtroom drama? It isn't hilarity that ensues. It's a goddamn depressing mess.