Film reviews and more
★★★★★ Remembered primarily for its passionate love story, the consensus over the years has been that 1951’s A Place in the Sun toned down the social commentary of Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy, focusing instead on the central relationship. Watching the film over 60 […]
★★★☆☆ The son of Canada’s foremost exponent of intellectually challenging body horror cinema, the genetically blessed Brandon Cronenberg made his Cannes Film Festival bow last year with Antiviral (2012), which now seeps its way into UK cinemas as part of […]
★★★☆☆ Based on an original screenplay written by its star performer Jonnie Hurn, Do Elephants Pray? (2010) is something of a low-key British indie oddity from director Paul Hills. Any film in which its central character literally hugs trees could […]
★★☆☆☆ Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) tells the tale of a clandestine love affair between Franklin D. Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Daisy. A whimsical comedy about the importance of ‘special relationships’, Michell’s period farce stars an eclectic […]
★★★☆☆ After the difficulties of making Hisss (2010), an audacious horror filmed in both Hindi and English, erratic director Jennifer Lynch returns to the murky psychological landscapes of Surveillance (2008) with Chained (2012); a chilling exploration of the nature versus […]
★★★☆☆ Belgium’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 2012 Academy Awards, Michaël Roskam’s Bullhead (Rundskop, 2011) finally receives a UK theatrical release thanks primarily to its star Matthias Schoenaerts’ critically acclaimed performance in Jacques Audiard’s […]
★★☆☆☆ This year has already seen the return of one 1980s action star to big screens, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Stand (2012) hitting cinemas last week. Fellow ‘Expendable’ Bruce Willis will be playing an old man coming out of […]
★★★★☆ Finnish filmmakers Jukka Kärkkäinen and Jani-Petteri Passi scored a surprise hit on the festival circuit last year with their 2012 music documentary, The Punk Syndrome. The film chronicles the trials and tribulations of Pertti Kurikka’s Name Day, four punk […]
★★★★☆ Hungarian auteur, Miklós Jancsó, made a name for himself in the mid 1960s with a loose trilogy of monochrome meditations on the corrupting nature of power. Even in these early pictures, his controlled visuals were noteworthy but in Second […]
★★☆☆☆ Carl Schultz’s To Walk with Lions (1999) is one of those films which leaves you feeling bad if you’re not enthusiastic about it. Starring Richard Harris, Honor Blackman and Geraldine Chapman, it is – like the story it sets […]
★★★★☆ Producer Roger Corman’s modus operandi was to take guys who wanted to be the next Godard and get them to make a 90-minute low budget exploitation film, so they could learn their craft and become more disciplined filmmakers. From […]
★★★★☆ One of German cinema’s first forays into talkies and shot simultaneously in an English language version, Josef von Sternberg’s tragic romance The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel, 1930) receives a worthy Dual Format rerelease this week courtesy of the […]