Film Review: ‘A Promise’
★☆☆☆☆ It’s been almost two decades since idiosyncratic French filmmaker Patrice Leconte delivered a near-masterpiece in the form of 1996’s Ridicule, an opulent and...
★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.
★★★★☆ There is tragedy and there is comedy, but the hinterland has never really received a proper definition. Melodrama suggests histrionics and musical accompaniment milking the emotional teat. Drama is too broad. And anyone who suggests “dramedy” should be punished. It would be “dramedic”.
★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega), can the ghost(face)s of the past be laid to rest?
★★★☆☆ His heavyweight champion status secured, the now-retired Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) spends his days lounging around his Hollywood mansion, having tea parties with daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) and running his gym with coach Little Duke (Wood Harris). But when a long-forgotten figure from Adonis’ past returns, his future is thrown into question.
★★★★★ Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are best friends. At 13, they are intelligent and autonomous enough to be allowed a certain freedom, but still full of the childish and spontaneous joy of being and imagining. They pretend villains are attacking the castle, run through the flower fields, and have so many sleepovers together that Leo’s mum wonders aloud if he’ll ever come home.
★★★☆☆ “Family isn’t a word…it’s a sentence”. So ran the tagline to The Royal Tenenbaums. For Hirokazu Kore-eda it could be argued that it’s a whole career. From Still Walking to the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, the Japanese auteur has spent the greater part of his career delineating the lines of attraction and repulsion, the dynamics of duty and care that make up families – both real and alternative.
★☆☆☆☆ It’s been almost two decades since idiosyncratic French filmmaker Patrice Leconte delivered a near-masterpiece in the form of 1996’s Ridicule, an opulent and...
★★★☆☆ Making a successful feature length cartoon is a hard nut to crack. For every animated hit, a dozen sink without trace, relegated to...
★★☆☆☆ French director Michel Gondry is well-known for his eccentricities and wild imagination. However, with his latest quirksome endeavour, Mood Indigo (2013), the director...
★★★☆☆ Partially funded by Kickstarter, Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013) arrives in selected UK cinemas this week having picked up a...
★★☆☆☆ The second entry in a proposed trilogy from British independent director Gareth Jones (2009’s Desire being the inaugural chapter), Delight (2014) isn’t short...
★★★★★ Structures within the time frame of empirical perspectives have a tendency to unknowingly look in the wrong direction. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter...
★★☆☆☆ The haunted house has become such a recurring trope in horror literature and cinema that it’s now a bona fide sub-genre in its...
★★★★☆ Coco Moodysson’s autobiographical 2008 graphic novel Never Goodnight related the delight and difficultly of forming a punk band, aged 13, in 1982. Along...
★★★☆☆ For Roman Polanski’s latest, the now octogenarian director has adapted David Ives play Venus in Fur, which is itself based on the 1870...
★★☆☆☆ Released to widespread critical and audience acclaim back in 1992, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning revenge tale Unforgiven is fondly remembered as a valiant last...
★★★☆☆ John Cassavetes was the blue-collard labourer of American arthouse. Like the atonal timbre of jazz that tested musical conventions, the director excelled when...
★★★★☆ Another forgotten gem given new life on DVD and Blu-ray here in the UK, John Guillermin’s Rapture (1965) is a beautifully-made and challenging...
★★★☆☆ The second crime thriller to come from director Michael Noer (whose previous film, 2010’s R: Hit First, Hit Hardest, was a collaboration between...
★★★★☆ Let it be howled from the mountain tops that with his extraordinary Noah (2014), director Darren Aronofsky has crafted a bold, phantasmagorical interpretation...