★★★☆☆ Making its way onto DVD and Blu-ray in a newly restored (circa 2012) form this week courtesy of Eureka’s always excellent Masters of Cinema label, Stanley Kubrick’s little-seen 1953 debut feature Fear and Desire offers a bizarre and intriguing glimpse into the legendary director’s future career. Utilising the backdrop Continue Reading
★★★★☆ About Elly (2009) – the fourth film from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar-winning director of A Separation (2011) – is another intense, contemporary tragedy about the ambiguities of truth and the consequences of being honest. Farhadi, to the extent of few directors before him, crafts a complex economy Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Most people would probably manage to just about survive the ignominy of living in a 26,000 square foot home with seventeen (count ’em) bathrooms. The fact that the infamous Siegel family were “busting out of the seams” in theirs was part of the reason that photographer and documentary filmmaker Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Director Ira Sachs follow 2005’s Forty Shades of Blue and 2007’s Married Life with Keep the Lights On (2012), a tale of a deeply fractured relationship between two gay men in New York, played out over the course of a decade. The story focuses on Erik (Thure Lindhardt), a Danish Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Winner of the Silver Bear prize at last year’s Berlinale and directed by acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold (Yella, Beats Being Dead), Barbara (2012) is a stark yet engrossing drama told against the icy backdrop of the East/West German political divide. Featuring an outstandingly suffocated central performance from the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Bemusing and astonishing audiences in equal measure since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year, French auteur Leos Carax’s cineliterate oddity Holy Motors (2012) has gone on to receive near universal critical acclaim – thanks primarily to the outstanding performance(s) of the film’s enigmatic and always watchable Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ The anthology movie has been a staple of the horror genre for several decades, with its origins creeping back even further to the days of expressionist Germany. Embracing that very same tradition, whilst simultaneously looking to rejuvenate it for the 21st century and tip a nostalgic hat to grimy Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Mark Tonderai’s House at the End of the Street (2012) tries to be something it isn’t – namely scary. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Max Thieriot and Elisabeth Shue, this would-be chiller starts atmospherically before becoming nothing more than a sub-standard, teenager-in-peril thriller. Sarah (Shue) and her teenage daughter Elissa (Lawrence) move next Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012) is a high concept adventure that imbues classic sci-fi elements with an understanding of smart storytelling. However, despite his ambitious and stylish amalgamation of themes, Johnson’s third film is as occasionally impressive as it is underwhelming. A director with a penchant for coalescing reality with Continue Reading