★★★★☆ The Amityville Horror (1979) and its 2005 remake focused on the supposedly true story of a supernatural attack upon one American family in the mid-70s. After moving into a former murder site at 112 Ocean Avenue, the Lutz family suffered a series of inexplicable and terrifying events. Until their Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Francis Ford Coppola continues his descent into filmmaking obscurity with Twixt (2011), an intermittently handsome horror starring a waning Val Kilmer and an ashen-faced Elle Fanning that surprised many when included within Cahiers du Cinéma’s rundown of 2012’s best new releases. Described by local sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Former wrestler Dwayne Johnson’s name has become synonymous with movies that describe themselves as high-octane and adrenaline fuelled. Ric Roman Waugh’s Snitch (2013), an action-thriller is another one of those films but with its sights set on a moral high ground. Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In (2012) Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Renoir (2012), Gilles Bourdos’ sumptuous portrait of the French master’s final years and his filmmaker son Jean’s first creative stirrings, is big on atmosphere but lacks dramatic tension. Father (Michel Bouquet) and son (Vincent Rottiers) fall for the same woman, Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret), who becomes Jean’s wife and Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Belgian director Joachim Lafosse seems to lay all of his cards on the table in the opening moments of his fifth feature, Our Children (2012). The action commences with a plaintive Murielle (an award-winning Émilie Dequenne) asking from a hospital bed for her children to be buried in Morocco, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Prolific Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To’s Drug War (2012) has sadly become yet another notable work from a respected auteur to go unceremoniously straight to DVD in the UK this year. Like Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (2011) (also released this week) and Abel Ferrara’s 4.44: The Last Day on Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Mikael Marcimain’s Call Girl (2012) arrives on DVD this week following a fruitful festival run, the highlight of which was bagging the FIPRESCI award at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Inspired by the 1976 Geijer Affair, this is an earnest yet curiously benign period drama about underage solicitation at Continue Reading
★★★★★ The third in arguably cinema’s most romantic trilogies, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy this year reprised their roles as Jesse and Celine, an American man and a French woman at the heart of indie filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Before triptych. Meeting on a train in Before Sunrise (1995) and reuniting Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ We all, if being honest, envy to some degree the lifestyles of Hollywood’s rich and famous. For most however, lusting after their wealth ends with reading celebrity magazines or watching the latest TV documentary. Not so for the Californian kids whose true story forms the basis for Sofia Coppola’s Continue Reading