★★★★☆ “A genius who also happened to be a pornographer,” is the trademark denomination for Walerian Borowczyk. His infinite compulsion for sex and the dissection of human fetishes was as compelling as it was contrived. Ultimately, the ineffable surrealism of his early work seems almost undue when smeared with his Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ First unleashed on the festival circuit almost two years ago, it’s taken Francesca Gregorini’s The Truth About Emanuel (2013) a while to find its way to UK audiences, even now in its DTV form. Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario) is a teenage girl in a small American suburb who’s still broken Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Erik Poppe’s globetrotting drama A Thousand Times Goodnight (2013) opens to an extraordinarily tense scene. War photographer Rebecca (French star Juliette Binoche) stands at a graveside in Kabul; women clad in black wail at the graveside, mourning the loss of a presumed loved one, before a figure within the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A quiet revelation at Cannes last year, Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin (2013) is a stripped-back revenge thriller that cruises down the central reservation of the genre, veering wildly between tense thrills and a series of alluringly awkward acts of violence to achieve instantaneous cult veneration. Behind a haze of Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Nicholas Stoller’s 2014 US comedy Bad Neighbours is a tired and contrived effort which once again posits Rogen as an adult fighting with his adolescent urges (a character trait which first emerged seven years back with Knocked Up) in a routine which is really beginning to grow stale. Mac Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ In the wake of Academy Award-winning American actor Robin Williams’ tragic and untimely death last month, it was arguably the work outside of his zany and larger-than-life persona that fans responded to most whilst playing tribute to the man. Like those films, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of little-known Israeli Continue Reading