Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ Bold casting, high production values, glitzy cinematography and over-the-top direction. It can only mean one thing: Ken Russell filming the life story of Rudolph Valentino, doomed Latin lover of the silent movie era. His death in 1926, aged 31, […]
★★★★☆ “A war is no war until brother kills brother.” This is just one of the devastating conclusions of Emir Kusturica’s bold and brilliant Underground; his lurid, comically absurd, and deeply divisive parable about the death of Yugoslavia. Kusturica was […]
★★★☆☆ There was little that could prepare the world for the release of Věra Chytilová’s incredible Daisies in 1966, even looking at her own prior output would have been largely in vain. Prior to the philosophical anarchy of her most […]
Diversity may have been the word on everyone’s lips at this year’s Academy Awards but there was only one headline by the end of the night: Leonardo DiCaprio winning his first Oscar for his role in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The […]
★★★☆☆ The Hermit Kingdom is a nickname inspired by North Korea’s secrecy and withdrawal from the wider world. The last remaining stronghold of Communism, it is a country reviled and lampooned in the West, where its mystery inspires ridicule and […]
★★★★☆ The name Felix Thompson is to be added to lists of up-and-coming directors to keep an eye on. His first feature, King Jack took home the audience award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and it’s easy to see […]
★☆☆☆☆ Standing on a sinking ship, Keanu Reeves watches as his latest big screen endeavour, ill-fated long before its theatrical release, sinks to the ignominious depths of the so-bad-it’s-just-plain-bad. First time writer-director Gee Malik Lindon had his name removed from […]
★★☆☆☆ At the heart of Andrew Renzi’s directorial debut The Benefactor is a kernel of an intriguing character study about the price of love and forgiveness and the desire to buy both. Surrounding it is a tangled mass of loose […]
★★★★★ The mind of ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano is surely a singular and unique one. Last month saw the blu-ray release of his acclaimed crime melodrama Hana-bi, a compelling fable of violence, grief and nihilistic defiance. This month we are treated […]
★★★☆☆ It’s a dog eat dog world out there. Or is that a hawk eat sparrow world? Or pig eat man? Or perhaps man eat man? Our insatiable proclivity towards to devouring one another is manifested in various ways through […]
★☆☆☆☆ It seems hard to believe that The Green Inferno is the first big screen directorial outing from Eli Roth since his 2007 sequel to Hostel, largely because he’s turned himself into something of a one-man industry and brand, producing […]
★★★★☆ In the first volume of a new collection, Arrow Video remind us of the hidden gems of horror which are now all but forgotten. The first box set of this series comprises Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood, The Witch Who […]