WARNING: Contains spoilers The front cover of the 44 Inch Chest DVD is littered with four star reviews. Unfortunately, not one of them comes from a particularly reputable source, unless you turn to Nuts, Loaded or Bizarre for views and opinions on the latest releases.Admittedly, perhaps aside from Sight & Sound’s Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ With such a ridiculous title, it would be unwise to go into Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) with the preconception that what you are about to see is anything but lavishly ludicrous. The plot fails to stretch far beyond the fact that four guys hop into a hot tub, Continue Reading
The 63rd Cannes Film Festival drew to a close with a genuine surprise as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul walked away with the coveted Palme d’Or prize for his surreal drama Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives (2010). Gliding over challenges from favourites Xavier Beauvois, winner of the Grand Prix Continue Reading
★★★★★ Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002) is shot by the undoubted master of cinematography – Conrad Hall: the man who lit every rose in American Beauty (1999) with an individual spotlight; the man who reportedly cried when looking through the viewfinder at Paul Newman because he was “just so Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious.” This was the view of New York Press columnist Armond White upon viewing Precious (2009), the second film by director Lee Daniels. Despite picking up two Academy Awards earlier Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Has there been a better time in recent memory to return to the age-old English legend of a poor man willing to stand up to a nation’s greedy oppressors? Unfortunately, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010) manages to miss a ripe opportunity to explore this pertinent element of the famous tale in Continue Reading
CUEAFS founder Spencer Murphy met with legendary Hong Kong action director Teddy Chan at this year’s Terracotta Film Festival to talk about the state of Hong Kong cinema, young blood entering the industry and Mr. Chan’s latest award winning effort Bodyguards and Assassins (2009). Spencer Murphy: On behalf of Coventry’s East Asian Film Society, thank Continue Reading
Australia always seems to be in some kind of crisis. If the country isn’t stressing over its cultural identity, its busy ripping into its own precarious government (although it must be said that the Antipodean populace has taken greater pleasure in observing Britain’s amusingly dishevelled political affairs).Hot topics of the Continue Reading
After more than twenty years of producing highly intelligent, absurd, dark and hilarious independent movies, Joel and Ethan Coen finally struck Academy gold with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller No Country for Old Men (2007). The brothers’ only previous Oscar wins had been for Fargo (1995), which took home Continue Reading
The struggle of any cinematic literary adaptation is the very transition from one medium to another. Novels are by their very nature prosaic, episodic and often rely heavily on narration to communicate both the plot and the emotive content within. McCarthy’s novel The Road follows two survivors of an unknown apocalyptic disaster (simply referred to Continue Reading
Terracotta Film Festival organiser and owner of UK specialist label Terracotta Distribution Joey Leung kindly agreed to an interview with the founder of CUEAFS Spencer Murphy. Here’s what was shared between the frenzy of screenings and after parties.Spencer Murphy: This is Terracotta Film Festival’s second year. How is it going Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) is an unsettling examination of how easily the desire to control others can lead to tyranny. The film follows three teenagers confined with their parents in an isolated Greek country house. Surrounded by high fences on all sides and in possession of a carefully manicured lawn and swimming pool, their Continue Reading
★★★★★ It was almost inevitable that the cinematic debut from actor, writer and director Chris Morris would attract an inordinate amount of controversy and media attention. For those uninitiated in the work of British comedy’s enfant terrible, Morris kick-started his career on Armando Iannucci’s BBC Radio 4 news-spoof On the Continue Reading
Is it possible to hypothesise that the introduction 3D film providing a new lease of life for the ‘dying’ industry of cinema? In some respects this certainly seems the case, especially in terms of how it’s not (yet) possible to download pirate versions of films in all their three-dimensional glory. Continue Reading
★★★★★ Nuri Bilge Ceylan has established himself as one of the most innovative directors working in film today, with the Turkish director – initially a photographer before switching to filmmaking in the mid-1990s – already distinguished by a BFI retrospective. Comparisons with Antonioni, Fassbinder and Tarkovsky are well founded, though Continue Reading
