Film reviews and more
★★★★★ Damián Szifrón’s ribald anthology feature Wild Tales (2014) has managed a Herculean feat. As an anthology film it’s pretty much perfect. Not a single story lets the side down and there is a consistently high level of storytelling. The scope of the film is parochial, centred as it is on the travails […]
★★★★☆ According to an octogenarian emcee as she lays down some beats on a neon-drenched intersection of sprawling graffiti-laden alleyways, Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe (2014) is “comin’ at ya from the ass-end of hell.” The Japanese gonzo director prefers his dials turned up to eleven and that’s most certainly the intention with this, […]
★☆☆☆☆ Audiences could be forgiven for their slack jaws when venerated thesp Liam Neeson blazed onto screens as the hard-as-nails lead in EuropaCorp’s dark and deliciously brutal genre flick, Taken, back in 2008. Since then, the actor has gone on to define not only his own brand of throwback action antihero, but a […]
★★★★☆ Events over the course of the last six months – most notably those surrounding the riots in Ferguson, Missouri in August – have once again given rise to urgent discourse on race relations in the United States. As though fated, into that charged atmosphere comes Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), a stirring and […]
★★★★☆ Two stand-out performances from John Lithgow and Alfred Molina illuminate Love Is Strange (2014), the new film from Keep the Lights On (2012) director Ira Sachs. Like 2013’s comparable Chilean offering Gloria, it’s the story of love in an older generation and just as moving. Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George, […]
★★★★☆ For more than thirty years, German filmmaker Edgar Reitz has devoted his career to chronicling his homeland through his ongoing Heimat series. He returns to the lineage of the Simon family with Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision (2013), an elegiac pastoral epic that profoundly values its sense of place whilst […]
★★★☆☆ To every lover of football, Paul Gascoigne embodies both what is good and bad about the beautiful game. A naturally gifted player forged on the streets of the North East, his loveable personality off the pitch and sublime moments on it endeared him to a nation. At the same time, an addictive […]