★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing and perfectly restrained coming-of-age tale which enters the running for the Golden Lion at Venice. Romain Paul plays Victor, a young lad living with […]
★★★☆☆ Adapted from crime author Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, Daniel Schechter’s Life of Crime (2013) is a polyester clad, bell-bottom sporting time capsule of seventies kitsch. An intelligently plotted crime caper starring Jennifer Aniston, rapper Mos Def and John Hawkes – as well as a glitzy supporting […]
★★☆☆☆ Lasse Hallström revisits familiar territory with The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), a warmly lit but cloyingly corny and drama-free adaptation of Richard C. Morais’ novel of the same name. Talented cook Hassan (Manish Dayal) and his family – Papa (Om Puri) and his other children – are forced […]
★★★★☆ Rightly selected as the opening salvo of this year’s well-attended 15th Film4 FrightFest in London, fervently followed American genre director Adam Wingard’s The Guest (2014) had the difficult task of coming after the excellent besieged family bloodbath You’re Next (2013), which had audiences howling with delight back […]
★★★☆☆ The documentary deluge in which we are still mired is so often lazily acknowledged as “a positive thing”. Our collective, unblinking admiration for the typical combination of liberal politics and gentle educational zeal has conditioned us to accept the creeping homogenisation of a cinematic from. We see […]
★☆☆☆☆ Best summarised as a watered down Memento (2000) aimed firmly at the Richard and Judy’s Book Club crowd and based on the hugely successful novel of the same name by S.J. Watson, Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go to Sleep (2014) is the sort of weightless literary adaptation […]
