★★★☆☆ Cast your mind back to a time when Steve Martin assumed the mantle of comedic king of the box office, sharing the title with the likes of Chevy Chase, John Candy and Eddie Murphy. Amongst the more inherently zany, audience-pleasers of that era like The Jerk and The Man Continue Reading
★★★★★ On first viewing, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love stands as an outlier against Paul Thomas Anderson’s other more seriously-minded work, starring, as it does, Adam Sandler as the lead in a quirky romantic comedy. But on closer inspection, Anderson’s trademark themes and character tropes are all present and correct: sparse but Continue Reading
★★★★☆ An enormous film deserves an enormous preservation effort. Film historian Kevin Brownlow spent more than thirty years tracking down film sources across the world to make up the five-and-a-half hour cut of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, completed with the BFI in 2000. Now the BFI have digitally restored the film Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Acclaimed director of 2013’s The Greatful Dead, Eiji Uchida returns with Lowlife Life, an often hilarious, charming and fitfully uncomfortable look into the world of low-budget Japanese filmmaking. Indie director Tetsuo (Kyohiko Shibukawa) is an initially charming Linklater-esque slacker, drowsily pawing at his girlfriend and making silly faces as Continue Reading
★★★★★ Rarely in cinema has the raw personal and symbolic power of dreaming been so effectively captured as in the Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 feature Dreams. A series of vignettes connected through theme and mood rather than narrative, Kurosawa’s late film beautifully evokes the short and often baffling nature of dreaming, Continue Reading