Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ The second feature from director Rolla Selbak, Three Veils (2011) tells the interconnected stories of three young Muslim women living in the US. The film opens with the story of Leila (Mercedes Masöhn), a young girl who finds herself in an arranged marriage with the hot-tempered Ali (Sammy Sheik). We also encounter […]
★★★☆☆ This week’s Second Sight rerelease of Carol Reed’s high flying epic Trapeze (1956) is a welcome reminder of the domineering screen presence of Burt Lancaster and the Technicolor epics that dominated the box office throughout the 1950s. Destined to be confused and compared with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth […]
★★★★☆ Recently rereleased alongside comedic classic Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966) courtesy of Eureka’s esteemed Masters of Cinema home entertainment label, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s immeasurably dark satire Pigsty (Porcile, 1969) parallels two equably disturbing and disparate worlds which come together for a suitably bleak, yet ultimately satisfying finale. Though […]
★★★☆☆ StudioCanal have just released four monster titles from Amicus Studios, the only company which even came close to beating Hammer at their own game during the 1960 and 70s. Warlords of Atlantis (1978), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), At the Earth’s Core (1976) and The Land That Time Forgot (1975), directed […]
★★★★☆ Despite its unremitting action sequences and oversexed narrative, Showtime’s Homeland emerged as one of America’s high-flying seasonal exports. As the pale lips of Damian Lewis gingerly pouted at the prospect of being exposed as an Eton thesp incognito, nations relished Claire Danes’ pursuit to develop another facial expression other than ‘aloof’. The […]
★★★☆☆ For a black-and-white German film from the silent era, Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking 1927 sci-fi Metropolis has had a colourful and noisy history in its 85 years of being. Lang’s classic found a new lease of life in 1984 when Giorgio Moroder – the man behind Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby […]
★★☆☆☆ Several years ago, Indian filmmaker Tarsem Singh made an ambitious, self-funded and visually glorious pseudo-fairy tale called The Fall (2006); unfortunately, the story didn’t live up to the wonder of the photography on-screen. With his family-orientated, revisionist take on the classic fairy tale of Snow White, he has clearly improved his storytelling […]
★★☆☆☆ John Cusack stars as renowned American author Edgar Allan Poe in James McTeigue’s The Raven (2011) – a pulpy Gothic thriller built upon the foundations of a period detective story. Ostensibly attempting to create a fictionalised account of Edgar Allan Poe’s final days (before he was found dead on a park bench), […]
Hot on the heels of the Toronto Film Festival programme announcement earlier this week (there’s beginning to be some serious rivalry brewing between these over-lapping showcases), the lineup for the 69th edition of the Venice Film Festival was announced by new Director Alberto Barbera in Rome yesterday, featuring a slimmed down Official Competition […]
★★★★☆ Available to own on DVD for the first time since its cinematic release back in 1957, J. Lee Thompson’s Woman in a Dressing Gown hints at what was to come from the British New Wave of the 1960s, with its realistic portrait of the breakdown of a marriage on a post-war London […]
Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit-born, Mexican folk singer who never quite made it in the States during the 1970s, is the humble star of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man (2012). The film tells the incredible story of how a bootleg copy of Sixto’s album Cold Fact arrived in apartheid South Africa and became […]
★★★★☆ Malik Bendjelloul’s strikingly assured debut Searching for Sugar Man (2012) is a fascinating documentary founded on the remarkable true story of a seemingly unsuccessful musician who unknowingly – to both himself and his producers – became a national sensation on the other side of the world. It’s a story so unbelievable that […]
★★★★☆ Lauded by a growing number of critics as Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni’s magnum opus, the visually arresting Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964) returns for a limited UK cinema run this week thanks to yet another exquisite BFI restoration, whilst also marking the 100th anniversary of the auteur’s birth. Starring Antonioni’s muse […]
★★☆☆☆ Cuisine-concerned feature documentaries are few and far between, and on the evidence of Artificial Eye’s El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2011), this is perhaps no real loss, so limited is the film in terms of niche appeal and visual flare. German director Gereon Wetzel admirably attempts to match the culinary experimentation on […]
★★☆☆☆ Released in UK cinemas this week, Essex-born filmmaker Dan Turner’s The Man Inside (2012) is a gritty urban thriller which, whilst packing a punch, misses its target once too often. Set on the mean streets of 21st century London, the story concerns Clayton (played by UK rapper Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas), who as […]
When it was first announced that someone was hoping to adapt David Mitchell’s award-winning, genre-hopping, millennia-spanning concertina of a novel for the big screen, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the people attempting such a feat were crazy. Well, crazy or not, the first images and a huge 5 minute trailer […]
★★☆☆☆ There’s little denying that the subject matter of Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda’s 3D animation Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (2012) – adapted from Dr. Seuss’ ecologically-minded 1972 children’s book – is extremely topical in today’s environmentally-sensitive climate. Sadly, this big screen outing takes the seeds of Seuss’ book and expands too far […]
The lineup was recently announced for this year’s 2012 Toronto Film Festival (6-16 September), and it looks like a packed and exciting programme. Opening the festival will be Rian Johnson’s keenly-awaited sci-fi thriller Looper, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hitman sent to the future to assassinate his future self (played by action icon […]