★★★☆☆ Trying to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time is always an unenviable task. That was the challenge laid out to directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano as they seek to follow-up on the massive critical and commercial success of 2011’s Untouchable, a light and hugely enjoyable Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Over the past few years, the film industry’s realisation that profits lie with a swathe of older viewers – the coined term is ‘the grey pound’ – has led to a plethora of films aimed squarely in their direction. The UK has seen big hits like The Last Exotic Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Quote: “You can stand up for a principle and you can die, or you can walk away and live.” This somewhat awkward line from a new low-budget British thriller, Born of War (2013), illustrates the tension at the heart of Vicky Jewson’s sophomore feature. On one hand, it’s an Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 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 of his cinematic compatriots approached the medium in the aftermath of the war – and with which he initially made his name in print – Continue Reading
★★★★☆ 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 ends online, and where the need for law enforcement intervention and criminal prosecution begins. Directed by Erin Lee Carr, the documentary does an outstanding job Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Deep Web (2015) could have been a documentary about the drug trafficking online retail establishment equivalent of a local Costco outlet. Deep Web could have been an insightful foray into the as yet unexplored field of the direct effect online drug caverns have on the multi billion-dollar war on Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 Forest Whitaker, Orlando Bloom and over one hundred grating clichés – finds its way onto DVD this week. Whitaker plays Captain Ali, a rigorous and Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 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, example. Denoting a particular variety of vacuous revelry, the director’s most celebrated works contain fleeting glimpses of it, but this is an audacious feature-length paean Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ You know the drill. A family moves into a large house. It seems perfect. Things are good, for a while. Kids start to complain about strange noises. Parents are spooked. Then it all ends in brutal bloody murder. It might sound like your common-or-garden chiller, but there is much Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Hot on the heels of his lyrical horror flick Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Peter Strickland returns in fine form with his most tender picture, The Duke of Burgundy (2014). With an all-female cast, sex politics and the limits of love are put under the microscope for examination here. There’s Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The lives of women in prostitution trying to survive in Chicago and young girls at risk of taking the same path, is revealed with compelling sensitivity in Kim Longinotto’s latest documentary, Dreamcatcher (2015). The film follows co-founder and executive director Brenda Myers-Powell as she works and volunteers tirelessly for Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Everything that surrounds Kurt Cobain – the lexicon, the iconography, the mystery – has up until this point come to be nearly apocryphal. Since his death in 1994, Cobain has become more of a pop culture icon than he may have ever fathomed. He’s been eulogized and idolized the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ 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 don’t understand but I can write it down, I approach poetry.” This could well be the filmmaker imparting wisdom through the mouth of his character, Continue Reading
★★★★★ Wojciech Jerzy Has took great relish in toying with narrative convention in the nestled labyrinthine pages of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). He dispenses with it entirely in The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), an oneiric odyssey through the cob-webbed recesses of memory and into the great beyond. Jan Nowicki plays Josef, Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ “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 and Professor Fether that is uttered by a plummy-toned Brendan Gleeson at the opening of Brad Anderson’s entertaining Grand Guignol genre-piece Stonehearst Asylum (2014) (previously Eliza Continue Reading
