★★☆☆☆ With Alfred Hitchcock arguably the toast of 2012, celebrated with a year-long season at the BFI and his classic 1958 film Vertigo topping the Sight & Sound ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll, Sacha Gervasi attempts to prolong the […]
★★★★☆ Completing Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s eclectic trilogy in style comes No (2012), a sophisticated, surprisingly humorous exploration of the opposition media campaign that ultimately brought an end to the country’s damaging dictatorship. Featuring an impressive lead performance from pint-sized […]
★☆☆☆☆ The Story of O: Untold Pleasures (2002), directed with a heavy hand by Phil Leirness, is about a jobbing photographer who dreams of producing an avant-garde art book. ‘O’ (Danielle Ciardi) has a tennis coach boyfriend, Rene (Max Parrish), […]
★★★★★ Filmed entirely in a garage over the course of a year, with a production budget of $1000 and two years of post-production, Steven Kostanski’s retro sci-fi Manborg (2011) is a titanic achievement of fun, a riotous adventure through a […]
★★★★☆ Short films have never had quite the same attention placed upon them as feature length films. However, with a new scheme launched by New British Cinema Quarterly, in partnership with independent distributors Soda Pictures, it seems that’s set to […]
★★★★☆ With a mawkish setup which sounds like it could easily have been concocted by a Hollywood studio, only to be packaged and presented to a Nicholas Sparks-fond audience, in reality Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s Untouchable (Intouchables, 2011) is […]
★★☆☆☆ Following on from the deeply baffling, divisive psycho-thriller Surveillance (2008), a film that somewhat managed to eradicate the memory of her previous directorial failures, Jennifer Lynch (daughter of esteemed cinematic surrealist David) returns to her thematic bread and butter […]
★★★☆☆ By the mid-70s, Mario Bava’s back was up against the wall. After kick-starting the golden age of Italian horror and introducing the world to giallo, the director suffered a string of commercial failures, which resulted in him losing his […]
★★★★☆ Often credited as the man who started the golden age of Italian horror, Mario Bava created works that managed to be hypnotically beautiful as well as uncompromisingly brutal. Black Sunday (1960), Bava’s directorial debut, set the standard for gothic […]
★★★☆☆ Adam Sandler returns to the world of animation for the first time since 2002’s ill-received Eight Crazy Nights. That film was a crude and joyless affair, featuring the same off-putting mix of gross-out and sentiment synonymous with Sandler’s recent […]
