★★☆☆☆ “There’s just no telling” says Bob (Casey Affleck) close to the end of David Lowery’s Texas-based criminal romance Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), screening in the Critics Week sidebar of Cannes. It seems a strange statement, coming after so much talk. Bob and Ruth (Rooney Mara) are childhood sweethearts. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Il Divo and This Must Be the Place director Paolo Sorrentino returns to Italian cinema (with a capital ‘I’ and a capital ‘C’) courtesy of The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza, 2013), a visual tour-de-force that strives to fulfil its own title. Long-time Sorrentino collaborator Tony Servillo stars as Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The recycled storyline of outsiders invading close-knit communities, particular ones that are odd due to their remoteness, is espoused by Chris Chibnail for his eight-part ITV crime drama Broadchurch (out now on DVD). Set amongst the idyllic cliffs of the Jurassic Coast, the fundamental premise is that a beautiful Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Italian-Greek actress Valeria Golino – perhaps most familiar to international audiences as Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Rain Man – makes her directorial debut at the London Film Festival with Honey (Miele, 2013). Irene (Jasmine Trinca) lives a double life. To her father and her boyfriend she ‘s a university Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ At initial glance Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21 (L’Assassin habite au 21, 1942) would appear to be mere comic folly from a director highly respected for serious thrillers. Arriving on Blu-ray in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series, its television-style whodunnit set up, cast of oddball suspects and Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Having brought the relatively unknown (to Western audiences) Bakumatsu Taiyô-den (The Sun Legend in the Last Days of the Shogunate, 1957) to Blu-ray last month, the Masters of Cinema series now provide another prime example of classic Japanese cinema unseen in the UK. In September 1938, at the tender Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Amy Berg’s sobering polemic West of Memphis (2012) shines a light on the failings of the American criminal justice system through the campaign to free a trio of wrongly convicted men after almost twenty years in prison. Having premièred at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, West of Memphis was Continue Reading