★★★★☆ French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has demonstrated a deft ability for creating fantastical worlds, as previously seen in Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1995) and his big crossover hit, Amélie (2001). All of these showed a gift for aesthetically-pleasing oddities, and his new work, The Young and Prodigious Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ With the nation’s attention fixed on Rio and the 2014 World Cup, passions are running high. And yet, despite the lavish excesses and camaraderie that comes with such an illustrious event, football is still seen by many as a “weaker” sport. Up against rugby, for example, some would say Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Iceland’s official submission to this year’s Academy Awards, Benedikt Erlingsson’s eccentric equine comedy Of Horses and Men (2013) has finally been let off the reigns. A rural anthology of curious fables, Erlingsson uses the communion between humans and horses to depict and in turn attempt to understand Icelandic culture. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Oculus (2013), the latest chiller from Salem-born director Mike Flanagan, began life as a short back in 2006. It went on to be widely-praised in horror circles, and now he has adapted into a feature-length supernatural chiller about a pair of siblings that believe that a haunted antique mirror Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Based on the previously well-documented true story of the West Memphis Three, Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot (2013) attempts to dramatise Mara Leveritt’s novelisation of the same name. The result is a melodramatic, calculable and subsequently dull procedural that makes you baffled by its inertness. When three boys Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Inspiration for Amma Asante’s sophomore feature, Belle (2013), was a tad unconventional; an 18th century painting entitled Dido and Elizabeth, which depicted a sprightly-looking, well-dressed black woman with her white cousin. By the standards of the day, this was a very unusual image that broke the social and artistic Continue Reading