Trilogy Review: Before Sunrise, Sunset & Midnight

I’ve seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset before, and I found the first one certainly compelling. But I didn’t realise it was a trilogy now and Joel, a fan of Cinema Cocoa, suggested I review them after guessing my film related picture question correctly over Facebook and Twitter! What I didn’t realise, was how much of…

Review: The Room

Like some sick, awful rite of passage for all film critics and film buffs, this is my burden to bear… the infamous “experience” that is The Room. It isn’t long before Johnny will marry Lisa, and while he struggles to get his promotion, he slowly discovers that despite being with her for seven years Lisa…

Review: Waltz with Bashir

Nominated in 2009 for the Academy’s Best Foreign film award, Waltz with Bashir is an honest, documentary style animation about surviving war… Following the true events and feelings of director Ari Folman who fought in the Lebanon war of 1982, Waltz with Bashir talks like a documentary but features fully animated sequences of the events…

Review: Room

Definitely not to be confused with The Room. Room follows the lives of a mother and her five year old son who have been living in captivity for seven years. Held against their will in a single room by a man who gives them just enough to live by, they plot an escape. But what…

Review: Hail, Caesar!

The Coen Brothers are back with a satirical take on 1950s Hollywood. An extremely busy production studio owner juggles control over several movie productions that struggle under misfortunes. From an actress losing a legal battle over her child, or an acclaimed drama director being given a lead star better suited for Westerns, to nosy journalists…

Review: Spotlight

Oscar season this year is sure giving us a lot of intensity isn’t it? A nominee studded cast stars in this grueling true story. Spotlight is an investigative team of journalists working for The Boston Globe. In 2001 they were assigned a special task by their new editor, a task of uncovering the secretive world…

Review: The Big Short

An intensive, jargon-filled drama that does the absolute best job at explaining one of the most deliberately complicated financial disasters in recent memory. In 2008 America, and later Europe, was hit by one of the worst financial recessions in decades. But in 2001 a handful of people saw it coming, and saw the fraudulent activity…

Review: The Revenant

Leo is having a really, really bad day. Director Alejandro G. Inarritu returns after his colossal success with last year’s Birdman, and The Revenant is a whole new experience! In the 1820s, during an expedition on the Native American frontier for hide, a hunter accompanying them has his son murdered and is abandoned by his…

Review: Creed

A respectable and well crafted spin-off from the Rocky franchise, Creed doesn’t pull its punches; it excels as well as anyone could have hoped. Adonis Johnson is alone in the world and only wants to fight, ditching his decent office job to seek a trainer to teach him how to box professionally. He knows where…

Saga Review: Rocky

With Creed entering cinemas in the UK this week, I decided to watch and review all of the Rocky films to get my opinion on them all. While I have seen the original film and the sixth entry, I hadn’t seen any of the others before now. Rocky will always be Sylvester Stallone’s own; it…