★★★☆☆ A field. A tower block. And now a disused warehouse. Over his last three films, Ben Wheatley has been perfecting the knack of a single-location drama. In the case of his new film Free Fire, Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump have shorn away the woolly political commentary and psychedelic Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The timing could not have been better for Sara Taksler’s new documentary Tickling Giants. Or worse if you think about it. Hosni Mubarak has returned home and the promise of the Arab Spring and the revolution which swept from Tahir Square and was witnessed around the world seems to Continue Reading
★★★★★ The Romania of director Cristian Mungiu’s terse, difficult Graduation is one weighed down by endemic corruption, systemic unfairness and economic defeat. Romeo (Adrian Titieni) dreams of a better life for his daughter, Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus), who has been awarded a life-changing scholarship to Cambridge University. But after she’s sexually Continue Reading
★★★★★ It’s surely the sheer, unvarnished humanity on display in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s celebrated Ali: Fear Eats the Soul that’s the film’s greatest success. When the eponymous Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan immigrant in his late thirties, meets nervous 60-year-old Emmi (Brigitte Mira) one evening when she steps Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ André Øvredal burst onto the scene with the irresistibly enjoyable Trollhunter in 2010, a mockumentary road trip humorously poking around under Norway’s less-travelled bridges and its folklore. For his follow-up he’s once again giving a novel twist to recognisable horror genre fare and whilst the high-concept of The Autopsy Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The audacious tagline for Pieces‘ grisly poster – “It’s exactly what you think it is” – isn’t kidding: Juan Piquer Simon’s 1982 splatterfest is precisely what one would expect from the director of gross-out creature feature Slugs. The constituent parts of Pieces may be strictly by the numbers, but Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Adapted from the long-running successful Manga series, the Lone Wolf and Cub films represent the very best in the chanbara genre. This Criterion set includes all six films, gorgeously remastered, as well as Shogun Assassin, the Americanised re-edit of the first two films that sacrifices narrative and thematic coherence Continue Reading
★★★★☆ There aren’t many directors working today with the same ambition and exquisite craftsmanship of James Gray. Despite being renowned for his complex, emotional storytelling, he continues to work within the fringes of the industry. His latest offering The Lost City of Z, a revisionist epic about colonial exploration in Continue Reading
★★★★★ It’s exceedingly rare for a filmmaker to present a deeply disturbed individual on the big screen, one who partakes in all sorts of grotesqueness, whose mind is one of deranged abandon and necrophile-longing, and somehow manages to portray not only what is repulsive, reprehensible and extraordinarily transgressive, but to Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Kleber Mendonça Filho’s debut feature Neighbouring Sounds was a taut social thriller about the paranoia of Brazil’s urban middle-class. One of the results of that paranoia was a proliferation of high-rise apartment blocks to house wealthy citizens and the building of such a complex is the antagonistic force in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “People shouldn’t live among rats.” So says resistance fighter Jang-ok (Park Hee-soon) at the climax of a blistering, terrifically choreographed prologue in Kim Jee-woon’s mercurial, labyrinthine historical thriller The Age of Shadows. Here is a film where allegiances, ulterior motives and loyalties are as transient and alluring as the Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Depravity and bad taste are the watchwords of director John Waters’ unique oeuvre, none more so than his unhinged 1970 effort Multiple Maniacs – even if its shock value is perhaps not as finely sharpened as his bad taste masterpiece Pink Flamingos. Multiple Maniacs’ grimy cinematography, bonkers performances and Continue Reading
★★★★☆ How is the ownership of one object assigned to one person or another, and what does the nature of ownership say about the owner? In Elio Petri’s hallucinogenic black comedy Property Is No Longer a Theft, Total (Flavio Bucci) is told by his father (Salvo Randone) that theft is Continue Reading
With the much-anticipated, Emma Watson-starring Beauty and the Beast in cinemas this week, live-action remakes are a hot topic. After the success of The Jungle Book and The BFG in 2016, the trend is set to continue over the next few years.To spark discussion among film lovers, Vue have flipped the current Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ They say never meet your idols, and it might also be advisable not to make films about them but Andrzej Wajda always defied such cliches. Some of his early masterpieces – Man of Iron and Man of Marble – were fictional odes to Solidarity hero Lech Walesa and then Continue Reading
