Film Review: ‘Samba’
★★★☆☆ Trying to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time is always an unenviable task. That was the challenge laid out to directors […]
Film Review: ‘Elsa & Fred’
★★★☆☆ Over the past few years, the film industry’s realisation that profits lie with a swathe of older viewers – the coined term is ‘the […]
Film Review: ‘Born of War’
★★☆☆☆ Quote: “You can stand up for a principle and you can die, or you can walk away and live.” This somewhat awkward line from […]
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Jump’ review
★★★☆☆ Surreality dons a cool sixties swagger in Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki’s intriguing and vaguely baffling Jump (1965). Abandoning the social realism with which many […]
Hot Docs 2015: ‘Thought Crimes’ review
★★★★☆ Thought Crimes (2015) will be remembered over the next few years for sparking grand scale debate on where one’s right to freedom and privacy […]
Hot Docs 2015: ‘Deep Web’ review
★★☆☆☆ Deep Web (2015) could have been a documentary about the drug trafficking online retail establishment equivalent of a local Costco outlet. Deep Web could […]
DVD Review: ‘Zulu’
★★☆☆☆ Bizarrely selected as closing film of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, French director Jérôme Salle’s ultra-generic South African cop thriller Zulu (2013) – starring […]
Blu-ray Review: ‘Satyricon’
★★★☆☆ If you’ve ever felt any uncertainty about precisely what the term ‘Fellini-esque’ means, then Satyricon (1969) is a definitive, two hour, larger than life, […]
DVD Review: ‘The House at the End of Time’
★★☆☆☆ You know the drill. A family moves into a large house. It seems perfect. Things are good, for a while. Kids start to complain […]
DVD Review: ‘The Duke of Burgundy’
★★★★☆ Hot on the heels of his lyrical horror flick Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Peter Strickland returns in fine form with his most tender picture, […]
DVD Review: ‘Dreamcatcher’
★★★★☆ The lives of women in prostitution trying to survive in Chicago and young girls at risk of taking the same path, is revealed with […]
DVD Review: ‘Cobain: Montage of Heck’
★★★★☆ Everything that surrounds Kurt Cobain – the lexicon, the iconography, the mystery – has up until this point come to be nearly apocryphal. Since […]
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ review
★★★★☆ There’s a conversation in Wojciech Jerzy Has’ hallucinatory picaresque epic, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), in which a character utters the following words, “if I […]
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Hourglass Sanatorium’ review
★★★★★ Wojciech Jerzy Has took great relish in toying with narrative convention in the nestled labyrinthine pages of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). He dispenses with […]
Film Review: ‘Stonehearst Asylum’
★★☆☆☆ “Believe nothing you hear and one half of what you see”, is a line lifted from Edgar Alan Poe’s The System of Doctor Tarr […]
Film Review: ‘The Good Lie’
★★★☆☆ It’s not often that an actor who is arguably the fourth lead in a film gets top billing, an unfortunate but necessary marketing tactic […]
Film Review: ‘The Falling’
★★★☆☆ In August 2011, fourteen students from Le Roy High School in upstate New York inexplicable began exhibiting perplexing medical symptoms including, but not limit […]
Film Review: ‘Exit’
★★★★☆ Celebrated Taiwanese cinematographer Chienn Hsiang’s debut feature Exit (2014) is a tactile and strikingly vivid expression of isolation which alludes to wider national anxieties. […]