★☆☆☆☆ 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 hugely absorbing period drama of verbal sparring in the court at Versailles. It’s safe to say that A Promise (2013), the director’s first English-language foray, won’t Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Making a successful feature length cartoon is a hard nut to crack. For every animated hit, a dozen sink without trace, relegated to being stuck on the DVD player just to keep the kids quiet on a wet afternoon. Fortunately, though clearly no Oscar contender, neither is Peter Lepeniotis’ Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ French director Michel Gondry is well-known for his eccentricities and wild imagination. However, with his latest quirksome endeavour, Mood Indigo (2013), the director falls into the trap of artifice over art, neglecting both plot and themes in favour of wild flights of unsubstantiated fancy. Gondry has based his film Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Partially funded by Kickstarter, Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013) arrives in selected UK cinemas this week having picked up a number of accolades from various film festivals across the pond. It’s easy to see why. While it may meander a little on occasion, the film is Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 on lofty concepts and ideas but does rather struggle to lift itself above its budgetary limitations. A meditation on loss, memory and the post-traumatic stress disorder Continue Reading
★★★★★ Structures within the time frame of empirical perspectives have a tendency to unknowingly look in the wrong direction. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) overcomes this problem by focusing on an intensely felt portrayal of the characterisation within a closed community that allows us to see the universality of Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 own right. From modern semis to labyrinthine old mansions, there’s little that’s more innately spooky than feeling unnerved in one’s own home, while filmmakers have utilised Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Coco Moodysson’s autobiographical 2008 graphic novel Never Goodnight related the delight and difficultly of forming a punk band, aged 13, in 1982. Along with two friends, and against the expectations of their peers and the adults around them, Moodysson created a dark and poignant tale of three friends who Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ For Roman Polanski’s latest, the now octogenarian director has adapted David Ives play Venus in Fur, which is itself based on the 1870 novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Taking place entirely in a theatre setting, the chamber piece sees a playwright, Thomas Novachek (Mathieu Amalric), Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 stand by an American movie genre that had been slowly dying a death for decades. The West, as it transpired, had been well and truly won, Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ John Cassavetes was the blue-collard labourer of American arthouse. Like the atonal timbre of jazz that tested musical conventions, the director excelled when left to experiment. Frequently, his movies appear as dummy-runs rather than finished products. His style stemmed from spontaneity, mistakes and impulse. His self-funded directorial debut Shadows Continue Reading
★★★★☆ 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 oddity. It’s a film which undoubtedly sent the top brass at Twentieth Century Fox (the studio who first brought it to screen) into a spin when Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The second crime thriller to come from director Michael Noer (whose previous film, 2010’s R: Hit First, Hit Hardest, was a collaboration between himself and fellow Dane Tobias Lindholm), Northwest (2013) does little that’s new but still does enough to grip and occasionally thrill over the course of its Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Let it be howled from the mountain tops that with his extraordinary Noah (2014), director Darren Aronofsky has crafted a bold, phantasmagorical interpretation of the Old Testament tale as we’ve never seen it before. In it, mankind – led by Tubal-Cain (British hardman Ray Winstone) – has spread like Continue Reading
★★★★★ French critic and auteur François Truffaut’s tone and style have been both successfully and unsuccessfully mined by numerous directors over the years, including the likes of Wes Anderson, Richard Ayoade and Shane Meadows. Never as knowingly hip and revolutionary as others, his cinema belongs to Renoir and Vigo, and Continue Reading