Film reviews and more
Announced by Stephen Fry and Sam Claflin, this year’s Bafta nominations were revealed yesterday morning. Wes Anderson’s Berlinale opener The Grand Budapest Hotel leads the pack with eleven nominations, earning nods for Best Film, Best British Actor, Best Director as […]
★★★★★ Claude Lanzmann is the custodian of the memory and oral tradition of the Holocaust. His life’s work has encompassed numerous films from his grand opus Shoah (1985) to Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 Heures (2001) and Un Vivant Qui […]
★★★★★ When Barton Fink was asked to write a wrestling picture, it struck him as the most demeaning use of his talents. He wished to commit to his political principles, and to the people. With Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014), we have […]
★★★★☆ When it was announced that Disney would be making a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s beloved musical for Into the Woods (2014), the ears of fans pricked up. Would the House of Mouse keep true to the sinister tone […]
★☆☆☆☆ Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez have a lot to answer for. Seven years after failing to replicate the sleazy low-budget thrills of the grindhouse era, there have been numerous attempts in their wake to achieve the same thing, the […]
★★★★☆ The barren, sun-scorched Australian Outback has proved a fertile creative ground for filmmakers interested in exploring tales of a dystopian nature, and director David Michôd gets great mileage out of it for his second feature, The Rover (2014). Bypassing […]
★★★☆☆ Are hopes and expectations dashed or raised by a film called Nurse (2013) starring Paz de la Huerta? It doesn’t suggest a classic, more a titillating horror comedy. Therefore, the whole endeavour edges close to the perilous shores of […]
★★☆☆☆ Based on Elmore Leonard novel The Switch (presumably the rather prosaic retitling was to stop confusion with star Jennifer Aniston’s 2010 comedy of that name) Life of Crime (2013) actually received a limited cinema release, although upon viewing, you’d […]
★★☆☆☆ If man is five and the devil six, then Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Scott Derrickson’s religious-themed supernatural drama, Deliver Us fom Evil (2014), takes place in a city of endless rain and tenebrous shadows occasionally disturbed by the diamond-dazzle of […]
★★☆☆☆ If one genre above all others is suffering from over saturation it is the horror genre. You can barely go a couple of weeks nowadays without seeing posters going for the latest offering shimmying its way down the genre […]
★★★★★ The penultimate picture in his Comédies et proverbes series, Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986) is his best work and arguably one of the greatest films ever made. It’s a film of unwavering humanity – unflinching in the face […]
★★★☆☆ Adapted from Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago’s The Double, Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013) employs the familiar narrative device of the doppelgänger to explore the duality of human nature. From Richard Ayodade’s recent Dostoevsky adaptation The Double (2013), to Cronenberg’s […]