CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult masterpiece Twin Peaks – starring Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise – was celebrated in decadent flair at London’s Riverside Studios this past weekend at the Twin Peaks UK Festival 2011. Now in its second year, the festival was captained by the Lynch-inspired Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Baseball has always been a popular subject for Hollywood to tackle and the passion for the US national pastime usually equates to a multitude of bums on seats. During the 1980s there was a flood of big-hitting baseball films such as Field of Dreams (1989), Major League (1989) and Continue Reading
Earlier today at a press conference in Central London, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese discussed his latest feature Hugo (2011), a magical 3D journey about a young boy (Asa Butterfield) who lives in Paris’ Gare du Nord train station, mending clocks and stealing parts in order to repair a complex automaton Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Sarah’s Key (2010), directed by Gilles Paquet Brenner and starring Kristin Scott Thomas (soon to appear in the film adaption of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) is a sophisticated film full of emotion. It takes the familiar topic of the Holocaust and combines it with a contemporary tale of Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Studies attempting to find a link between mobiles and medical traumas are infamously vague and inconclusive, mainly due to the fact that many of them are carried out by the phone companies themselves. Fortunately, Blood in the Mobile’s (2010) Finnish director Frank Poulsen has found a new angle to Continue Reading
★★★★☆ From directors Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog – and thanks to DVD distribution from Second Sight – comes 2010 feature documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010), an affectionate look at the lives of those who live and work in the remote Siberian wilderness. Herzog has produced Continue Reading
★★★★☆ After a string of high quality TV drama successes in the form of The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones (DVD/Blu-ray release date pending), you only have to look at Mildred Pierce’s (2011) credit list to get an idea of the pedigree behind the HBO miniseries. Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Director Jim Sheridan, best known for the Academy Award-winning In the Name of the Father (1993), returns with Dream House (2011), a mystery-thriller starring Daniel Craig (returning in the role of 007 for Bond 23, Sam Mendes’ Skyfall [2012]), Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts (next seen appearing alongside Leonardo Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Jonathan Levine’s 50/50 (2011) stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen in a tragic comedy about a young man who discovers he has a rare form of spinal cancer, yet is unwilling to let it ruin his life. It is loosely based on the similar experiences of the film’s screenwriter Continue Reading
This week, CineVue met up with British director Simon Curtis to talk about his newly released homage to Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier and the amazing story of Colin Clark, My Week with Marilyn (2011). The film blends two of Clark’s publications, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me and My Week Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Despite accruing an impressive array of film festival credits, director Darragh Byrne’s feature debut Parked (2010) is unable to compare in ambition or quality to recent notable Irish efforts such as In Bruges (2008) or this year’s The Guard. All to often finding itself on the wrong side of Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Jarreth Merz’s documentary An African Election (2010) is an eye-opening account of the 2008 democratic election in Ghana between Attila Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party, during which the country’s inhabitants queued for up to and beyond 10 Continue Reading
Any kid who hung around video shops in the late 1980s will remember the The Monster Squad (1987) with great affection and as the lights went down at the Prince Charles Cinema every soul in the auditorium was hoping Fred Dekker’s cult classic would stand the test of time.Written by Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Directors David Weissman and Bill Weber (The Cockettes [2002]) return to screens this week with the powerful and moving AIDS focused documentary We Were Here (2011), set during the 1970s and 80s in the liberal US city of San Francisco. Drawing on intimate interviews from people who moved to Continue Reading
British director Amit Gupta’s debut feature, the superb Resistance (2011, review here), is released in cinemas nationwide this week, and stars exceptional UK talent in the guise of Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen. Set in an alternative 1944 where D-Day has failed and the Nazis have crossed the Channel and Continue Reading