Film reviews and more
★☆☆☆☆ US comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim bring their unusual (and quite frankly bizarre) style of humour to the big screen with Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012) – a film more likely to anger than entertain. Having been loaned $1 billion to make a film, Tim and Eric turn in a six-minute travesty to their […]
★★★★☆ American Iranian director Maryam Keshavarz debuts with Circumstance (2011), the sensual tale of a complex love triangle set in the swirling underground party scene of Tehran. A wealthy, liberal family struggle to cope with the increasing sexual rebellion of their daughter Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), who is falling in love with her best friend Shireen (Sarah Kazemy). The situation […]
★★☆☆☆ Conceived as a tribute to the celebrated 1930/1940s vaudeville comedy act of the same name, The Three Stooges (2012) hails from well-known comedy directors and self-proclaimed enthusiasts the Farrelly brothers. Unlike their usual brand of offensive humour, however, The Three Stooges brings with it a welcome and surprising level of warmth, but is sadly too thronged and weak-minded […]
★★★☆☆ Matthias Hoene’s zomventure (he dislikes the phrase ‘Zomody’), Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) has the kind of moniker you’d expect to discover whilst rummaging through the bargain bin in a petrol station. Yet whilst this remark may not be entirely inappropriate – Hoene’s homage to London’s East End is undeniably cheap and tacky – behind its unabashed plagiarism lies […]
★★★★☆ From the creative mind of Peter Strickland, the director behind 2009’s hugely promising Katlin Varga, comes the long-awaited Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Starring our very own Toby Jones amongst a host of all-Italian talent, Strickland’s Film4 FrightFest entry (having already screened at the revamped Edinburgh Film Festival) is an audiovisual tour-de-force, doing for giallo what Michel Hazanavicius’ The […]
★★★★★ The final completed picture by the great enigmatic raconteur Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973) is a rarely seen but essential exploration of the world of art forgery, cinematic illusion and good old-fashioned fraud. Yet the film’s conception was just as strange and mysterious as its content. Director François Reichenbach made a documentary about the famous Picasso forger […]