There’s a dispiriting trend at the moment to take iconic villains of page, stage and screen, isolate them from their usual narrative and furnish them with an explanatory, excusatory or – worst of all – redemptive back story which turns them into the victims of circumstance or an indifferent world. While CRUELLA seems, at first, to cut its cloth to suit that particular silhouette, it’s tailored to…

Last year I made a rod for my own back by putting out the “1st Annual Craggus Movie Awards” and now, on the eve of the 87th Academy Awards, here I am paying the price for saying “1st Annual”.

The rules: only movies released in 2014 in the UK are eligible (including preview screenings and, to be honest, I’ve bent the rules a bit because I only settled on a definitive dating approach recently).…

Much has been made of the Meta premise of Michael Keaton playing an aging actor, once famous for playing an iconic superhero, looking to prove his artistic integrity by mounting a Broadway play but there’s so much more to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s technically dazzling, intensely personal and kinetic film than that one single gimmick.

Ingeniously filmed to appear to be one continuous, fluid…