Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ Following last year’s The Cabin in The Woods, traditional horrors have started to seem seriously out of date. Thankfully, with Saw director James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), a return to the traditional tropes are as fresh as ever in […]
★★☆☆☆ Released in the late summer of 2011, Raja Gosnell’s The Smurfs made an astonishing (and not to be snivelled at) $560 million at the worldwide box office, despite a lukewarm critical response. So, in that respect, The Smurfs 2 […]
★★☆☆☆ Whatever happened to the 90-minute Hollywood studio comedy? Was it damned to obscurity by the bromantic Judd Apatow’s unwavering faith in his actors’ abilities to riff themselves through any situation? The Heat (2013) is yet another comedy so bewitched […]
★★★★☆ Mere minutes into Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013), it becomes evident that the critical derision which greeted it at Cannes was wholly misplaced. While it inevitably opens itself up to accusations of pretentiousness, it’s a picture that […]
★★★★☆ Andrei Konchalovsky is one of cinema’s true enigmas. Loosely descended from Tolstoy and born into tsarist nobility in 1937, he has the genetic make-up of a genius, and once displayed all the signs, but to look back upon his […]
★★★★★ If Bruce Lee hadn’t passed away a week before the US release of Enter the Dragon (1973), Robert Clouse’s martial arts masterpiece may well have been regarded as nothing more than a taste of things to come. As it […]
★★★★☆ The English translation of French maestro Jacques Rivette’s debut feature Paris nous appartient (1962) is “Paris belongs to us”. It could also have easily been the title of his 1981 oddball offering Le Pont du Nord. Coveted by cinephiles […]
★★★★★ It would be something of an understatement to label D.W. Griffith’s American Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), as controversial. The film became infamous due to its overt racism and negative stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans, coupled […]
★★★★☆ “She created a monster as her secret lover!” screamed the poster for Possession (1981), a truly indefinable 80s horror hybrid, brainchild of the hugely undervalued Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski. This is a tagline that not only short-sells the film’s deeply […]
★★★☆☆ After helming the ultra low budget and critically praised urban thriller Shifty (2008), BAFTA nominated director Eran Creevy returns with Welcome to the Punch (2013), an explosive action film that sees Creevy depicting London in altogether more sleek and […]
★★★☆☆ Based on American author Peter Dexter’s 1995 pulp novel of the same name, Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy (2012) found itself derided and lauded in almost equal measure after screening in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Blending gaudy, […]
★★★★☆ Yaron Zilberman’s feature debut A Late Quartet (2012), starring Catherine Keener, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken, follows the fortunes of an acclaimed New York string quartet who find its future threatened by petty rivalries and inner discord. When […]