Film Review: ‘Contraband’
★★☆☆☆ Mark Wahlberg returns to UK screens this week in Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s US box office-topping action thriller Contraband (2012) (a loose remake...
Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★☆☆☆ Mark Wahlberg returns to UK screens this week in Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s US box office-topping action thriller Contraband (2012) (a loose remake...
★★☆☆☆ US director Cameron Crowe returns to narrative filmmaking this week with We Bought a Zoo (2012), giving the Hollywood treatment to the true...
The word that would best describe new action comedy 21 Jump Street (2012) (released in UK cinemas this Friday) seems to be ‘unexpected’. From...
★★★★☆ “They’re revamping a program from the eighties because they’ve got no creativity and they’re really fucking lazy.” Those are the words of an...
Birds Eye View welcomed a healthy amount of both men and women to its International Women’s Day Gala event. Now in its tenth year...
★★☆☆☆ Darragh Byrne’s debut feature Parked (2011), starring Bel Ami’s Colm Meaney and Colin Morgan, is a disappointing example of contemporary Irish cinema, especially...
★★★☆☆ Stephane Rybojad’s Special Forces (Forces spéciales, 2011) follows a French military unit’s high-risk mission to rescue anti-war correspondent Elsa Casanova (Diane Kruger) from...
★★☆☆☆ The death of Joyce Vincent came under great media scutiny in 2003. Her skeleton, identified dentally by a picture of her smiling, was...