★★★★☆ “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever,” quoth Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. The turning wheel of time on which the master orator predicated this assertion is one that is palpably intertwined with the viewing experience of Aleksander Ford’s bombastic Knights Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Traditional narrative tropes of chance and fate are employed to glean some insight into living in Communist era Poland in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1987). Imagine Sliding Doors (1998) but rather than setting in motion very different romantic entanglements, the failure to catch a train fundamentally turns on a Continue Reading
★★★★★ “Since the days of Cain, no punishment has improved the world or deterred anyone from committing crimes.” A Short Film About Killing (1988) – Krzysztof Kieslowski’s expansion on the fifth chapter of his lauded Dekalog series – sets out its stall. Far more than mere advocacy against the death Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) is a bizarre remake/sequel hybrid of the 1976 film of the same name. That film, directed by Charles B. Pierce, recounted the real life murders attributed to a serial killer called ‘The Phantom’ who haunted the streets of Texarkana, located on the border Continue Reading
Kristian Levring looks like one of the characters in his new film The Salvation (2014) – a distinct face, long dark hair, you could imagine him taking out someone with a rusty Victorian sniper. But the Danish director, who lives in North London, is more the intellectual than the aggro Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The first film in over eight years for director Kristian Levring, The Salvation (2014) was a much-needed outlier on the festival circuit. A rare genre piece in a field of arthouse heavyweights, it served as a timely reminder of cinema as the ultimate medium of pulp. Outside of this Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Over a decade on from the success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, fantasy is still proving a crowd pleasing genre both in cinemas and on television. Game of Thrones continues to dominate the small screen, while Jackson’s own Hobbit trilogy is a multi-billion dollar success despite being Continue Reading
