★★☆☆☆ Over the past few years, a trend has emerged that’s seen action stars of yesteryear tooling up once more to riddle bad guys with bullet holes and quip to their heart’s content. Spearheaded by The Expendables (2010), this new […]
Last night at a star-studded ceremony in Southern France, the 66th Cannes Film Festival announced the prize winners from its competition strand. Many believed Tunis-born director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour to be the best film in show, […]
★★★☆☆ Following on from 2011’s raucous American middle-class comedy Carnage – and as we await his long-gestating Dreyfus affair project – Polish director Roman Polanski returns to UK cinema screens with Venus in Fur (2013), a two-handed adaptation of the […]
★★★★☆ Director Jim Jarmusch has managed an almost impossible feat with new film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – he’s made vampires interesting again. British actors Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play […]
★★★★☆ Władziu Valentino Liberace was a phenomenal success, his recording and performing career spanning four decades. A flamboyant showman and housewives’ favourite, Liberace fought long and hard to keep his homosexuality a secret until his death in 1987. Thus, Steven […]
★★★★☆ Award-winning Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda lights up this year’s London Film Festival with Like Father, Like Son (2013), a closely-observed family drama which delves into contemporary Japanese life and, in the process, becomes an examination of social values and […]
★★★★★ Last year, it was a tale of time-tested amour which ultimately went on to pick up the Palme d’Or. This year, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) – a tale of young love and the intensity/agony it […]
★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Un Certain Regard section of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, Katrin Gebbe’s debut film Nothing Bad Can Happen (Tore tanzt, 2013) is a harrowing tale of abuse with a highly dubious morality at its core. Tore […]
★★★☆☆ James Gray has always enjoyed a good reputation in France and so it comes as little surprise to see his fifth film, The Immigrant (2013), showing in competition here at Cannes. The year is 1920 and in the wake […]
★★★★☆ The Cannes Film Festival just got medieval on our asses with Arnaud des Pallières’ Palme d’Or outsider Michael Kohlhaas (2013), a tale of injustice and revolt set in 16th century France. Adapted from the Heinrich von Kleist novella, Pallières’ […]
★★★★★ The Coen brothers return to the London Film Festival this year with the barnstorming Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a picaresque odyssey following the close-calls and mishaps of an also-ran folk songster within the New York Greenwich Village scene. It’s […]
Olivier Assayas fidgets endlessly. On the finer nuances of 1970s radicalism, the French director swivels around with unflappable urgency and a staccato delivery to his response. Such as the characters in his semi-autobiographical movie, Something in the Air (2012), Assayas […]
