★★☆☆☆ Arriving on DVD this week following a limited UK theatrical release, French director Eric Valette’s The Prey (La proie, 2011) attempts to be a jack-of-all-trades, gritty crime thriller – yet predictably ends up as master-of-none. Part-prison drama, part-police procedural and part-manhunt, Valette’s film is a jumbled mishmash of different Continue Reading
★★★★★ 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 a remarkably consistent partnership. We’re thrust straight into the action as the film opens with a young boy whose life of conflict and disobedience has resulted in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ There’s so much going on in the BFI’s The Lacey Rituals box set that it’s often hard to get a grasp on it, all down to the artist in question – Bruce Lacey. A leading figure of the 1960s counter-culture movement, Lacey worked with everyone from Spike Milligan to Continue Reading
★★★★★ At a time when the eyes of the world are glued to the already bustling city of London in the run up to the Olympic Games, the BFI release of the beautifully restored Wonderful London takes a prescient step in the opposite direction, ruminating and exploring a London long Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The promotional material for Wild Bill (2012) bore all the hallmarks of a mockney crime caper, down to it being the directorial debut of actor Dexter Fletcher who appeared in Guy Ritchie’s trend-setting Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Fletcher’s film however is a very different kettle of Continue Reading