Month: May 2019
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Film Review: The Blue Angel
★★★★★ The films produced in the inter-war period in Germany were among the most vibrant, innovative and politically charged in all cinema. As part of the BFI’s season of Weimar Cinema, running throughout May and June, one of the its greatest examples is back on the big screen in Josef von Sternberg’s devastating romantic melodrama.…
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Edinburgh 2019: Programme highlights
The full programme for this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has been revealed, bolstering 18 world premieres and 72 UK premieres of films brought to the Scottish capital from countries all over. Now in its 73rd year, the world’s longest continuously running film festival is back and ready to take film lovers on a voyage…
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Film Review: Godzilla: King of the Monsters
★★★☆☆ “Let them fight” was the raison d’etre of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, the kaiju-centric creature feature that kickstarted Legendary Studio’s monster-verse back in 2014. Michael Dougherty’s sequel, King of the Monsters has certainly taken its forbear’s mantra to heart, offering up a smackdown between Godzilla and his most iconic enemies, writ extra-large in its IMAX presentation. The success of Godzilla has always…
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Film Review: Thunder Road
★★★★☆ Opening with an excruciating but perversely funny funeral scene, Thunder Road is unapologetic in showing the rawness and devastation death can have on people. Eulogising his dead mother – via a humiliatingly awful song and dance routine – is Texan police officer Jim Arnaud, a deeply troubled man, who over the slow-build of a…
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Film Review: Support the Girls
★★★☆☆ The uniquely American phenomenon of Hooters-style sports bars provides the subject matter for Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls. More Cassavettes than Coyote Ugly, the film rarely concerns itself too deeply with the politics of such establishments, preferring instead to take a softer, human look at the lives of its employees. The sexual mores of…
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Hollywood’s most famous casino players
For decades, Hollywood has enjoyed an incredibly close relationship with casinos; whether it’s the countless major movies that have been based in and around casinos and the casino industry or the multi-millionaire movie stars which regularly make their way to big-name casinos to try their hand at the games on offer. Such is the popularity…
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Film Review: Booksmart
★★★☆☆ It seems there has long been a need for graciously uncool female protagonists in the teen coming-of-age canon, those who remind us of ourselves a little more than the 90s girls from the likes of Empire Records or The Craft that we wished we could be. More recently, Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird was heralded as…
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Film Review: XY Chelsea
★★★★☆ In 2010, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison after she leaked classified documents and footage of military operations in Iraq. In 2013, Manning (born Bradley Manning) came out as a transgender woman, before her sentence was commuted in 2017. Through archival footage, reconstructed online conversations and interviews…
