CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★☆☆☆ Punctuated with kind of casual bursts of grim violence which will be familiar to anyone versed in Asian extreme cinema, The World of Kanako is a mixed bag of cinematic influences and styles. With opening titles that wouldn’t look out of place in a low-rent 1960s US action TV Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The opening shot of Nicolas Winding Refn’s dreamlike tenth feature The Neon Demon sees Elle Fanning as rosy-cheeked model Jesse draped in macabre glory on a sofa, her throat apparently slit. Blood spools onto the floor as a photographer stares on, snapping away, Jesse’s eyes vacant. There’s a lush, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “Nobody sees anyone as she is, let alone an actress playing a troubled young woman 40 years after her death. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves.” This is a flagrant bastardisation of a quote from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but Continue Reading
★★★★★ Before the French revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity provided the basis for Polish writer-director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy – the height of his international fame – the Ten Commandments were the starting point for 1988’s Dekalog. Arguably more ambitious than Three Colours, the ten-part series of Continue Reading
★★★★☆ If you want to see the beautiful and highly improbable spectacle of your nearest and dearest in floods of tears at the end of a zombie film, Train to Busan is your ticket. While Sang-ho Yeon’s film doesn’t do anything particularly radical with the rulebook in a way which Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ There’s something deeply unsettling about the unstoppable, magma-like flow of Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno. Imperceptibly bubbling away in time with the veteran filmmaker’s monotone delivery, and left-field, impenetrable musings on mankind’s interaction with the natural world, this documentary may concern itself with the incendiary hostility of some of Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an expansive and nebulous place, the riches of which the movies have only really begun to discover. After the scientific and Earth-bound exploits of the Avengers, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy voyaged to the furthest reaches of space through the eyes of a boy Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “Try not to fuck it up, but don’t worry if you do.” Full of late twenties anguish and uncertainty, this rather tongue in cheek mantra could be applied to many aspects of Chanya Button’s Burn Burn Burn, a film which champions the notion of trying again, and again, if Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood.” These are the now iconic, and still deeply relevant, words uttered by Ice-Cube’s Doughboy in John Singleton’s timeless drama Boyz n the Hood as he reflects on the struggle of the black community Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children explored the desperation and unhappiness that can drive a mother to physically harm her own children. Now Lafosse is back with another – marginally lighter – drama about domestic dysfunction, this time featuring Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn as a couple with two daughters (played Continue Reading
Set for its launch with an opening night gala showing of Mandla Dube’s Apartheid-era biopic, Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlungu, Film Africa 2016 is the Royal African Society’s 6th annual celebration of cinema from right across the continent. Narrative film and documentaries from South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Chad, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Much like the multitude of heady jazz numbers that flow throughout the film, Paris Blues is a cool, breezy and laid-back character-led romantic drama with strong turns by the four likable leads, not least the late, great Paul Newman, effortlessly exuding that trademark piercing blue-eyed intensity and magnetism. The Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Now available on DVD and Blu-ray, Odds Against Tomorrow is also another welcome addition to the BFI’s Black Star slate. One of the most striking things upon viewing this admirably dark and gritty crime yarn is the realisation that the filmmaker behind it is the same person who unleashed Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Proving himself once again a master of comic timing and pathos, Takeshi Kitano’s 1996 feature Kids Return represents something of a thematic medley for the director, playing in equal parts as a high school comedy, gangster film and boxing drama. While it is perhaps not as stylistically accomplished as Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Widely regarded as François Truffaut’s greatest masterpiece, Day for Night also signalled the end of the French New Wave and caused a life-long rift between the director and his friend and fellow Nouvelle Vague auteur Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut was never interested in being the rebel that Godard saw himself Continue Reading