Film reviews and more
One of the annual highlights of the documentary calender, Sheffield Doc/Fest returns today (5-10 June) with another reassuringly full programme that’s true testament to the current health of factual filmmaking. Opening this year’s festival is the UK premiere of The […]
★★★★☆ The feature debut of playwright debbie tucker green, Second Coming (2014) opens with a shot of a murmuration of starlings. Their symbolic meaning – and particularly their endlessly beguiling flight – is often interpreted as purporting to familial relationships […]
★★★☆☆ The laws of diminishing returns dictate that as a film series goes on, the more rote and tired that series becomes. Unless you’re a Fast & Furious franchise. But that’s only because the makers widened the goal posts and […]
★★☆☆☆ Chess has always leant itself kindly to cinema, affording both wider allegorical application and pleasing visual opportunities. Four Corners (2013) is the second film to arrive on British shores this year juxtaposing the ease with which a chess-whizz can […]
★★★★☆ There are few Hollywood stories as intriguing as that of Cannon Films, the independent distributor born from the ambitions of Israeli immigrants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the pair made a name for themselves […]
★★★★☆ Having already made his first and comparatively more sombre full feature in the form of 2009’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, American filmmaker Damien Chazelle returns with Whiplash (2014). A bruising and bracingly melodious cat and mouse […]
★★★☆☆ Thomas Hardy’s tale of pastoral passions in the heart of South-west England, adapted carefully but beautifully by director John Schlesinger, Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) stands the tests of time. Does it still manage to captivate? Does it […]
★★★★☆ The best science fiction serves as a barometer of the times, a tool with which to gauge the concerns of our age. In Ex Machina (2015), the superb directorial debut of genre polymath Alex Garland, our contemporary technological fear […]
★★☆☆☆ In American Sniper (2014), Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) insists on keeping both eyes open when peering through the sights of his rifle. His reasoning is sound; to keep a weather eye on the rest of his surroundings. […]
