Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★☆☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Orizzonti sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, Michele Alhaique’s gangland romance Senza Nessuna Pietà (2014) is a slickly made yet brutally clichéd piece of implausible and ultimately inconsequential nonsense. Mimmo (Pierfrancesco Favino) is a construction worker […]
★★★★☆ A tubercular nightmare vision of war in all its bloody ferocity, Tetsuo (1989) director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain (2014) stormed into competition at Venice with a loud and frankly mad rush to seize its objective, regardless of […]
★★★★★ If The 400 Blows (1959) constituted the songs of innocence for Antoine Doinel, then Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed & Board (1970) make up his songs of experience. Made in relatively quick succession almost a decade after director François […]
★★★★☆ With a title like Next Goal Wins (2014), you’d be forgiven for thinking that British filmmakers Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s debut documentary is all about the beautiful game – but you’d be wrong. At the centre of the […]
★★★☆☆ In Sandra Nettelbeck’s wistful romance Mr. Morgan’s Last Love (2013) Michael Caine plays Matthew Morgan, a retired American professor living in Paris several years on from the death of his wife (Jane Alexander). A lonely grief-stricken man, Matthew wanders […]
★★★★☆ Ognjen Svilicic’s These Are the Rules (2014) is a modest work of quiet desperation, but it’s obvious restraint and slow unwinding has a powerful, unsettling and ultimately moving effect. Middle-aged bus driver Ivo (Emir Hadžihafizbegović) lives with his wife […]
★★☆☆☆ Saverio Costanzo returns to Venice in competition with his second film, Hungry Hearts (2014), a claustrophobic drama about a young couple and their conflicting views on parenting. Adam Driver plays Jude (Thomas Hardy would be a good point of […]
★★★★☆ In 1998, independent director Steve Yeager chronicled the lifework of transgressive eccentric John Waters in Divine Trash. The documentary’s success manifested itself into a warranted trophy at that year’s Sundance Film Festival for Best Documentary. Yeager comfortably capsuled the […]
★★☆☆☆ That (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb’s first instalment in this Marvel franchise reboot, 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, failed to live up to its presumptive title was something of a disappointment, as a refreshing take on the web-slinger […]