Venice 2012: ‘Paradise: Faith’ review
★★★☆☆ Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy began with Paradise: Love (2012), first screened just a few months ago in Cannes. Each film takes as its protagonist […]
Venice 2012: ‘Stories We Tell’ review
★★★★☆ Canadian director Sarah Polley’s most famous work, the Julie Christie-starring Away from Her (2007), dealt with the effects of Alzheimer’s on a relationship between […]
Venice 2012: ‘Superstar’ review
★★★☆☆ “I woke up one morning and found myself famous,” wrote Lord Byron, one of the first celebrities in our modern sense of the word. […]
Venice 2012: ‘Tai Chi 0’ review
★★★☆☆ Directed by Stephen Fung, choreographed by Sammo Hung and starring a whole host of Kung Fu legends, Tai Chi 0 (2012) is a kinetic […]
Venice 2012: ‘Betrayal’ review
★★☆☆☆ Love, obsession and revenge are the themes of Kirill Serebrennikov’s beguilingly strange, yet ultimately flaccid Betrayal (Izmena, 2012). The film is a Crime and […]
Film Review: ‘Cockneys vs. Zombies’
★★★☆☆ Matthias Hoene’s FrightFest opener Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) is an enjoyable, bare-faced zomventure that delivers exactly what the title promises – a fun-filled, B-movie […]
Film Review: ‘[Rec] 3: Genesis’
★★☆☆☆ Whilst his former directorial partner Jaume Balagueró was off making FrightFest sleeper hit Sleep Tight (2012), Paco Plaza appears to have squandered his time […]
Film Review: ‘Total Recall’ (2012)
★★☆☆☆ Back in 1990, ‘Austrian oak’ Arnold Schwarzenegger hit our screens as the mind-muddled Douglas Quaid in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, an adaptation of the […]
Film Review: ‘Samsara’
★★★★☆ Following 1992’s acclaimed Baraka, groundbreaking director Ron Fricke presents his latest feature Samsara (2011), a similarly mesmeric, non-verbal meditation about the invisible bonds shared […]
Film Review: ‘Berberian Sound Studio’
★★★★★ British director Peter Strickland follows up his acclaimed debut feature Katalin Varga (2009) with the eerie and aurally-disturbing Berberian Sound Studio (2012), a tale […]
Venice 2012: ‘Bait 3D’ review
★☆☆☆☆ The 69th Venice Film Festival got under-way with its first foray into 3D, diving into Kimble Rendall’s Ozploitation movie Bait (2012). The story opens […]
Venice 2012: Our coverage begins…
The 69th Venice Film Festival kicks off later today (running from 29 August-8 September) with Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist – showing on the Lido […]
DVD Review: ‘Truth or Dare’
★★☆☆☆ British filmmaker Robert Heath returns to screens with Truth or Dare (2012), a low-budget horror that attempts to put a generic spin on the […]
Blu-ray Review: ‘Rumble Fish’
★★★☆☆ Francis Ford Coppola Rumble Fish (1983) is the latest cult favourite to be given the Blu-ray treatment thanks to the Masters of Cinema. It’s […]
DVD Review: ‘Dinotasia’
★★☆☆☆ A heady combination of Werner Herzog and dinosaurs should be enough to draw people to David Krentz and Erik Nelson’s pseudo-documentary Dinotasia (2012), a […]
DVD Review: ‘White Vengeance’
★★★☆☆ Director Daniel Lee’s White Vengeance (2011) follows a long precession of Chinese period action epics which have been released in the UK with growing […]
DVD Review: ‘Let the Bullets Fly’
★★★★☆ Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly (2010) is now one of the highest-grossing Chinese films of all time, and it’s not difficult to see […]
Film4 Summer Screen 2012: Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’
This August, Somerset House’s Film4 Summer Screen season played host to a very special screening of British ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The […]