★★★★☆ Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are (2013) – his follow-up to blood-soaked vampire drama Stake Land (2010) – is so convincing that it almost makes the case for the horror remake as a viable, rich art form in and of itself. Not […]
★★★☆☆ Action movies are typically a young man’s genre but an older man’s game. The real tough cookies have been thickened by years of experience, driven to solitude by guilt, and are embittered by the system they have operated in for too long. At […]
★★★★★ Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), like the industry it so wittily satirises, is beguiling, effortlessly stylish and always in vogue. This evergreen classic receives a timely rerelease from Park Circus this week, coinciding conveniently with the bi-annual fashion circus currently making its way around […]
★★★★☆ Metal’s reputation has tolerated the most unfounded social clichés. Hackneyed variations of ink-coated sweat-riddled aggressors lacking in any emotion other than sightless rage. However, an ongoing throng of documentaries – including Don Argott’s As the Palaces Burn (2014) – have sought to disassemble […]
★★★★☆ A landmark work in the lexicon of 1970s art film, Federico Fellini’s highly venerated opus Roma (1972) arrives in a pristine restoration as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series, giving it the Blu-ray treatment it deserves. Coming after perhaps his most notable […]
★★★★☆ Coming two years before his breakout commercial horror hit Carrie, Phantom of the Paradise (1974) finds revered seventies “movie brat” Brian De Palma in a lively and altogether more playful mode – and all the better for it. For anyone yet to see […]
★★★★☆ Don Siegel was one of the key directors in the undervalued period of American cinema that took place just before the New Hollywood palette cleanser. His 1964 effort The Killers is pure pulp bliss; a testosterone-driven comic book noir that simmers with violent […]
★★★★☆ History tells us that the neophyte directors who emerged in sixties France made films that challenged the established aesthetic tradition. It forgets to tell us about a director like Claude Sautet, whose hard-nosed thriller Classe Tous Risques (1960) was thrust into almost immediate […]
★★★☆☆ Alan Taylor’s ‘Phase Two’ offering Thor: The Dark World (2013) sees Chris Hemsworth’s thunder god return in his second standalone movie, and provides much of the humour, full-on special effects and breathtaking set pieces we have come to expect from the Marvel Studios […]
★★★★☆ Admittedly, a “time-travelling indie comedy” may not be the most appealing concept upon first glance, but much like the characters in this charmingly offbeat yarn, initial perceptions differ from what is eventually achieved. On the strength of Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) alone, director […]
★★★☆☆ With their feature debut, Helen (2008), British directing duo Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy toyed with notions of identity as they followed a young woman playing the role of a missing girl as part of a police reconstruction. They plunge into similar thematic […]
★★★★☆ What did the “Lubitsch touch” look like before it was the “Lubitsch touch”? There are plenty of clues in this welcome reissue of Masters of Cinema’s Lubitsch in Berlin box set, subtitled Fairy-Tales, Melodramas, and Sex Comedies – an indication of the thematic […]
★★★☆☆ In 1994, the late Antonia Bird paired up Linus Roach and Robert Carlisle for Priest (1994), the tale of a Catholic priest torn between the church and his homosexuality. Now, another female director, Malgorzata Szumowska tackles the same subject but from a different […]
★★★☆☆ There’s something about the films foraged from the extensive BFI archives which makes the viewer hanker after a Britain which no longer exists. Their latest volume, The Driving Force, featuring various British Transport Films from the 1950s through to the 1980s, is a […]
★★★★★ At a pivotal point in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful crime drama The Godfather: Part II (1974), Mafia kingpin Michael Corleone states, “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” Not only one […]
★★★★☆ An unnerving examination of promiscuity and infatuation, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013) combines the ethnography of gay cinema with an exhilarating mix of auteurist sadism and nail-biting suspense to craft a truly mesmerising erotic noir. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a carefree […]
★★☆☆☆ There’s something altogether uneasy about the depiction of war in Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad (2013). It’s nothing to do with the flag-waving patriotism nor any kind of moral quandary, but instead the Russian blockbuster’s slick, stereoscopic visuals. A sea of blue-grey is dimmed further […]
★★★★☆ Those cinemagoers concerned that the teenage adventures of Bella and Edward might have had a lasting negative impact on the movie vampire can rest easy. Last year, Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2013) showed more than just intent to thoughtfully engage with the matter of […]
