2011
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai’
★★☆☆☆ Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Ichimei, 2011) – starring Kôji Yakusho, Naoto Takenaka and Hikari Mitsushima – can best be described as troublesome; a remake (based on Masaki Kobayashi Harakiri [1962]) that is full of potential, yet ultimately fails to deliver. The plot is your usual fair of revenge and honour that…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’
★★★★★ Criminally overlooked at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s seminal psychological drama We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) – starring Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller and John C. Reilly – receives its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival tonight and stands as not only one of the truly outstanding…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’
★★★★☆ One of the finest documentaries screening at this month’s BFI London Film Festival, if not all year, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 has been a labour of love for its Swedish director Göran Olsson and production team (including US actor turned co-producer Danny Glover). Olsson has poured over hundreds of hours of seemingly forgotten…
-
Venice 2011: ‘Contagion’ review
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) – with a large ensemble cast including Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Jude Law – marks a re-emergence of the old ‘revenge of nature’ genre, but rather than sharks, bees or birds, the enemy to humanity here is much smaller (microscopic in fact) but far more deadly: a…
-
Film Review: ‘The Yellow Sea’
★★★★☆ Director Hong-jin Na turned a lot of heads in 2008 with the Cannes hit The Chaser, a thrilling story based on one of South Korea’s most bizarre serial killers. Along with actors Jung-woo Ha and Yun-seok Kim, he was part of a fantastic trio which even got the attention of Warner Bros. for a…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘The Kid with a Bike’
★★★★★ Directed by two time Palme d’Or-winning Belgium duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Kid with a Bike (Le Gamin au Vélo, 2011) continues this remarkably consistent sibling partnership’s ability to capture the poetic essence beneath the misery which often consumes life.We’re thrust straight into the action as the film opens with a young boy…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘Natural Selection’
★★★★☆ One of many unexpected highlights of this year’s 55th BFI London Film Festival, Natural Selection (2011) is an amusing, unconventional comedy from first-time director Robbie Pickering, starring Rachael Harris, John Diehl and Matt O’Leary.Barren, evangelical housewife Linda (Harris) discovers that her husband Abe (John Diehl) has been secretly donating to a sperm bank for…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘Take Shelter’
★★★☆☆ Screening at this year’s 55th BFI London Film Festival, Take Shelter (2011) once again unites Shotgun Stories (2007) director Jeff Nichols and actor Michael Shannon. Set against a backdrop of Middle American domestic life, Take Shelter is a far more visual film, combining elements of terror with a kitchen sink drama that confirms both…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘Guilty’
★★★★☆ Concerning the most horrific legal scandal in modern French history, director Vincent Garenq’s Guilty (Présumé coupable, 2011) is a gripping drama based on the memoirs of Alain Marecaux (Philippe Torreton) who was wrongly accused of several accounts of child molestation and thrust into a terrifying web of false testimonies and heavy handed police investigations.Early…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2011: ‘The Descendants’
★★★★☆ It’s been a seven year wait for a new film from US director Alexander Payne (his last, Sideways, was in 2004), but fortunately his latest effort The Descendants (2011) doesn’t disappoint in any shape or form. Featuring an Oscar-worthy central performance from BFI London Film Festival favourite George Clooney, Payne has once again crafted…