★★★★★ The miners’ strike of 1984-5 was a pivotal moment in the social and political history of the UK, and one which, 30 years on, we are just beginning to properly put into any sort of context. The landscape of […]
★★☆☆☆ After an almost decade-long gap since Sin City (2005), you’d think that collaborators Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez would have made time to craft a watertight narrative and ensure that expectations were not only met but exceeded in belated […]
★★★☆☆ In the attempt to present a life on film, there will always be parts that are left out. The camera cannot capture every minute detail of a person’s life, and that’s an understanding audiences will usually approach with. Where […]
★★★☆☆ Filmmaker Anthony Wilcox embarks upon his first feature film in the director’s chair with a commendable amount of composure – an attitude presumably gained from experience further down the ladder on films such as Hot Fuzz (2007) and Brighton […]
★★★★☆ Last year, the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab swallowed screens with their briny and disorientating fish-eye-view experience, Leviathan (2012). When their latest film, Manakamana (2013) opens in the pitch dark to the whirring of mechanical winches audiences may be forgiven […]
★☆☆☆☆ The Green Prince (2014) is the fantastical story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hassan Yousef one of the founders of Hamas; who was an informant for the Israeli internal secret service Shin Bet for more than 10 […]
★★★★☆ There’s something inherently cinematic and therefore mysterious about institutions, and with the release of Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum (2014) we have Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery (2014) arriving on screens in January. It’s worth mentioning both films in the […]
★★★☆☆ The notion that documentary and drama should not be mixed is overturned by The Circle (2014), an ingenious and touching slice of little known gay history beautifully made by Stefan Haupt and the Swiss entry to the 2014 Best […]
★★★★☆ 1960 was a landmark year for scary movies. Among pioneering offerings by Bava, Franju, Hitchcock and Powell was Roger Corman and The Fall of the House of Usher – the first entry in what became known as the ‘Poe Cycle’. Like horror’s […]
★★★★☆ It’s extremely fitting that after Tom Hooper’s star-studded version of Les Misérables (2012) has exited stage-left that Raymond Bernard original 1934 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s timeless novel should re-appear fully restored. The film was released as three separate features […]
★★★★☆ Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner star in this re-issued classic of film noir. Adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, The Killers (1946) borrows the investigative flashback structure of Citizen Kane (1941) to uncover why ‘the Swede’, a […]
★★★★★ The release of D.W. Griffiths’ technically dazzling and morally contemptuous The Birth of a Nation in 1915 provoked outrage from the American public. Archaic racial stereotypes were roundly condemned, and according to legend this reaction partly prompted the themes […]
★★★★☆ For their 2013 collaboration, Interior. Leather Bar, Travis Mathews and James Franco worked on the premise of a reimagining the lost 40 minutes of William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising – cut by censors who deemed it too explicit. Rather […]
★★★★☆ The life of revered Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti almost feels too unwieldy and ambitious to fit into just one feature-length documentary, but Alex Gibney makes a good fist of it with Finding Fela (2014). The many […]
★★★★☆ Director Ari Folman follows up the daring Waltz with Bashir (2008) with an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress, through which he explores the darker side of Hollywood and the human psyche. Robin Wright (playing a version […]
★★★☆☆ The London Palestinian Film Festival opened with Najwa Najjar’s Eyes of a Thief (2014), Palestine’s chosen representative in the 2014 Academy Awards. Following on from her well received debut Pomegranates And Myrrh (2008), Eyes From A Thief is, like […]
★★★★★ It’s hard to believe the film that launched a thousand talky, hipster-inflected indie movies and changed the whole face of the industry is actually twenty years old. The sophomoric effort of a young film geek who had greatly impressed […]
★★★☆☆ Despite cultivating an identity as one of cinema’s most loveable malcontents, Bill Murray’s achievements remain unrecognised by the Academy. However, thanks to Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent (2014), Murray finds himself in the running for the industry’s equivalent of canonisation; […]
