Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ Roger Vadim’s 1962 film Love on a Pillow sees Bridgit Bardot as the kind and caring Geneviève Le Theil, a well to-do girl from an upper-class family. After leaving Paris and arriving in Dijon to settle her inheritance, Geneviève meets a young man, Renaud Sarti (Robert Hossein), who attempts to commit suicide […]
★★★☆☆ Time behaves in unpredictable ways, notions of reality and fantasy collapse and painful personal and national histories are examined in two films by Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has, The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) and The Saragossa Manuscript (1964). Both films are based on works of literature; the latter from Jan Potocki’s historical novel The […]
★★★☆☆ Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic Straw Dogs – a film that drew a huge amount of criticism in its day, and seen by many as a debasement of women – manages to effectively capture some of the thrilling intensity of the original, yet brings nothing new to the table. […]
★★★★☆ The latest release to come from the BFI’s very own DVD label, Andrew Kötting’s This Our Still Life (2011) is a deeply personal, lo-fi collage of the director’s secluded Pyrenean farmhouse (named simply ‘Louyre’), where he lives with his wife Leila and daughter Eden. Eden was born with a rare neurological disease, […]
★★★☆☆ Ignore the bombastic DVD/Blu-ray cover with its armour-clad Nazi soldiers and pyrotechnics – the newly released Resistance (2011) couldn’t be much further away from an exploitative, WWII romp. From debut British director Amit Gupta – and adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name by Owen Sheers – the film is […]