Adam Driver

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Marriage Story battles for the high ground but risks sanctimony

    Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 31st December 2019

    Relationships are weird. You come to them as a pair of individuals, both trying to find common threads while maintaining individuality. Then you move in together and over time adjust to each other's idiosyncrasies, forming new habits based on a shared life, until one day you realise you're a completely different person. Later if you decide to wave goodbye to sleep for about fifteen years by having children it adds an adorable layer of walking on eggshells to proceedings. The only way to really make it work is to be totally open about your thoughts and feelings - keeping secrets is just asking for trouble - so if/when things fall apart and you're held to account for your part in the failure you get to gloat over that deceitful snake (just kidding, honey - L for Love!).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 16th December 2015

    Star Wars: The Force Awakens might just be the best film of the last 30 years or so…

  • While We're Young

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 3rd April 2015

    The sight of a middle-aged man in a trilby is hard to bear. Particularly when it isn't accompanied by what you judge to be any other changes in his regular attire: just a single hat, borne as a standard on the scalp, saying, Will this do? Am I cool again? The cycle of youth makes us all obsolete sooner or later, and it's hard to accept. And while there's a dignity to aspire to in Don Draper, defiantly immaculate in sports jacket and tie at a party full of hippies, can you blame a man for wanting to get back what he had when he can't pinpoint when he lost it?

  • What If

    Movie Review | Becky Suter | 21st August 2014

    The world of rom-coms is a fickle one; for every When Harry Met Sally there's The Other Half (starring Danny Dyer, it's on Netflix) or something-or-other starring Isla Fisher tripping over a lot. Whilst it's not going to break new romantic ground, the likeable leads and overwhelming sweetness of What If won me over. God I hate myself sometimes.

  • #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?

  • Frances Ha

    Movie Review | Ali | 25th July 2013

    Could Frances Ha be the Greta-ist, Gerwiggiest film ever made? A black and white light-hearted indie comedy about a blundering yet loveable New York ballet teacher? It sounds like the kind of hardcore mumblecore destined to be of interest to all but the most entrenched Brooklynites, but Frances Ha is an unlikely feelgood crowd-pleaser - it's sweet and funny and darling and almost unbearably lovely. And thankfully, everyone enunciates.