DVD Review: ‘The Human Centipede 3’
★★☆☆☆ Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 3: (Final Sequence) represents something of a challenge to the star-ratings system. Give it one star or give it five. Heck, give it none! The most notorious film series in […]
DVD Review: ‘The Face of an Angel’
★★★☆☆ Michael Winterbottom’s latest feature, The Face of an Angel (2014), explores the intersection of beauty, youth, sex and violent crime. Inspired by Amanda Knox’s alleged murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy, Winterbottom offers […]
DVD Review: ‘The Gunman’
★★☆☆☆ With The Gunman (2015), Sean Penn becomes the latest inductee into that club slowly being filled by older gentlemen with a particular set of skills. Pierre Morel was a key figure in the meteoric rise […]
Film Review: ‘The Salt of the Earth’
★★★★☆ “Everyone should see these images to see how terrible out species is,” says Brazilian photography Sebastião Salgado as he reviews the photographs that he has taken throughout his career. It has been a career that […]
Film Review: ‘The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson’
★★★☆☆ “If it’s gonna kill me, I don’t want it to bore me.” It’s an apparently novel way to approach a diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, but is precisely the one adopted by Wilko Johnson. Most […]
Film Review: ‘Ant-Man’
★★★★☆ Starring Paul Rudd as the diminutive hero, Ant-Man (2015) is a hilarious heist movie cum superhero flick that proves to be a hugely enjoyable and playful way to bring the studios ‘Phase Two’ to a […]
Film Review: ’13 Minutes’
★★★☆☆ The problem with Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 13 Minutes (2015) is ultimately the weight of history. Where the knowledge of what is to transpire elevates every scene of his monumental Oscar-winning portrayal of Hitler’s final days, Downfall […]
DVD Review: ‘X+Y’
★★★☆☆ The evolution of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon has acclimatised modern audiences to notion of tittering at the eccentricities of people on the autistic spectrum. Generalities blind audiences to the fact that people on that […]
Interview: Marjane Satrapi on black comedy ‘The Voices’
“Earl Grey is my favourite tea,” says Marjane Satrapi as she stuffs a handful of teabags into a large Thermos sat on the table before her. We’re sat in a London hotel room to chat about […]
DVD Review: ‘The Voices’
★★★☆☆ Ryan Reynolds deserves at least some credit for the patchwork of roles he’s picked recently. There’s the countless rom-coms, his superhero duds, acting work with Atom Egoyan and Rodrigo Cortés, but there are also curiosities […]
DVD Review: ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch…’
★★★★☆ The dead-eyed cast of Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) would appear just as home on the streets of London as Gothenburg, or any other city experiencing the dreary […]
VOD Review: ‘Elephant Song’
★★★☆☆ Xavier Dolan proves once again that the world revolves around him (and that’s a good thing) in the quiet Canadian drama Elephant Song (2014). The wunderkind is once again the secret spice that brings the […]
DVD Review: ‘Chappie’
★★★☆☆ With a hip-hop, cyberpunk aesthetic paying homage to 1980s classics Short Circuit (1986) and RoboCop (1987), by way of the critically derided Tank Girl (1995), Neill Blomkamp’s unorthodox sci-fi Chappie (2015) is an energetic, experimental genre […]
Karlovy Vary 2015: ‘Time Out of Mind’ review
★★★★☆ When Bob Dylan released his thirtieth studio album in 1997, critics claimed that the ominous atmosphere created by producer Daniel Lanois was palpable, but also almost drowned the singer’s vocals. It’s interesting then that New […]
Karlovy Vary 2015: ‘Heil’ review
★★★☆☆ German director Dietrich Brüggemann took the arthouse world by storm last year with his fourth feature, Stations of the Cross (2014) – a restrained, rigorously formalist study of religious fanaticism in present-day Germany realised in […]