★★★★★ John Schlesinger’s celebrated slice of sixties British New Wave makes its debut on Blu-ray this week, and remains an absolute must-see for all serious cinephiles. Although lumbered with the ‘angry young men’ label back at the time of its […]
★★☆☆☆ Screened as part of last year’s EIFF and Film4 FrightFest lineups, British director Ian Clark’s low-budget debut The Facility (2012) (formerly known as ‘Guinea Pigs’) now finds its way onto DVD, having just missed out on a theatrical release. […]
★★★☆☆ Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel from controversial author Salman Rushdie, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (2012) makes a bold but ultimately unfulfilled attempt to bring the author’s magical realist style to the screen. Born at the stroke of midnight […]
★★★☆☆ American acting icon Dustin Hoffman’s long-awaited directorial debut, Quartet (2012), has met with optimistic anticipation, bolstered by the impressive cast which boasts national treasure Maggie Smith, a delightfully camp Michael Gambon and a gleefully sex-crazed Billy Connolly. Set in […]
★★★☆☆ Based on the harrowing true story of one family caught up in the 2004 tsunami, Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) returned to screens last year with The Impossible (Lo imposible, 2012), a gruelling yet uplifting tale of […]
★★★☆☆ The opening scene of Dragon (Wu xia, 2011) features a family eating together, uniting over a meal as they sit around the dinner table; it’s this coming together of family, and the intimacy of home life, that sets the […]
★★☆☆☆ The Belarus-born director of new horror Come Out and Play (2012) is something of an eccentric figure. After a near-death experience whilst shooting a documentary on Huichol shamanism in Mexico, he forged himself a new identity; Makinov (no first […]
★★★☆☆ In the ever-watchable Chimpanzee (2012), Blue Planet producers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield transport us to the Ivorian rainforests of Taï National Park, where we are introduced to three-month-old Oscar – a cheeky ape who gains an unexpected ally […]
★★☆☆☆ Whilst Danish director Niels Arden Oplev’s original (and best) adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) possessed many notable merits, less can be said of his first foray into the American market, Dead Man Down […]
★★★★★ Two simply-drawn stick men approach each other on a field of white and share an awkward encounter as they pass. One of them, Bill, inexplicably stumbles through simple sentences and conflates words before they depart, never to see one […]
★★★☆☆ To say that Pedro Almodóvar’s Pointer Sisters-referencing I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013) is one of the flamboyant Spanish auteur’s more inconsequential efforts would perhaps be doing it a disservice; it is, after all, as interested in sexual […]
