★★★★★ Leading American film critic Andrew Sarris once nominated 1953’s Madame de… as his candidate for ‘the greatest film of all time’ – high praise indeed. Meanwhile, his principal critical detractor, Pauline Kael, called Ophüls’ film “perfection”, marking one of the few times the pair actually agreed on something. Most Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Chao-Bin Su’s Reign of Assassins (Jianyu, 2010) is a Chinese martial arts movie that, whilst formulaic in places, still manages to exceed the expectations of even the most staid of genre enthusiasts. Drizzle (played by the ever youthful Michelle Yeoh), a former assassin, has stolen the remains of a Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ It’s almost too easy to be cynical about a film like Richard LaGravenese’s Beautiful Creatures (2013). With the blockbusting Twilight franchise currently sitting comfortably on $3.3 billion worth of box office receipts, Hollywood is hungrily looking for the next cash-generating supernatural-teen-angst obsession. Beautiful Creatures ticks all the right boxes: Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Polymath James Franco and director Travis Mathews take it upon themselves to re-imagine the lost 40-minutes of William Friedkin’s controversial drama Cruising (1980) in new film Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). The absent footage was reputedly cut due to its sexually graphic content by the MPAA, so that Friedkin could Continue Reading
★★★★☆ French-Canadian director François Delisle’s fourth film, The Meteor (Le météore, 2013), is an avant-garde exploration of isolation that quite rightly appears in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section. Eschewing conventional narrative techniques, the film includes not a single line of dialogue or actual human interaction and instead attempts to Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “You’re a disturbing young man” says Buffy (Judy Davis) to Boy (River Phoenix). The latter is showing the former around a fallout shelter in the Utah desert, redecorated by him for prosperity as a mystical cave. It’s one of the few completed interior scenes in the long-lost but not Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Bonds between children and their parents have been significantly prominent in the blossoming career of South Korean director So Yong Kim. Her first two films both contained young female characters with absentee fathers and her latest offering is no different. With For Ellen (2012), however, the setting is the Continue Reading
★☆☆☆☆ To this day, Die Hard (1988) is still regarded as one of the quintessential action movies of our time. It birthed a new action hero in John McClane, and it helped make Bruce Willis one of Hollywood’s premier action stars. Twenty-five years on and three sequels later, with the Continue Reading