CineVue
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Film Review: ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’
★★★★★ The man with the whip returns for a limited IMAX run of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, ahead of the 8 October Blu-ray release of the Indiana Jones quadrilogy. After endless BBC repeats and sour memories of the ridiculous Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull (2008), you mightn’t be keen…
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Film Review: ‘Inbred’
★☆☆☆☆ What do you get if you cross The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Straw Dogs (1971), with a dash of The League of Gentlemen black humour? Answer – Inbred (2011), the new comedy horror from director Alex Chandon. We start with four young offenders, Zeb (Terry Haywood), Dwight (Chris Waller), Sam (Nadine Rose Mulkerrin),…
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Film Review: ‘Big Boys Gone Bananas!*’
★★★☆☆ Amongst the skyless summits of capitalist bureaucracy flutters creativity that no company can overturn. Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (2011), Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s follow-up to Gertten’s heinously underplayed Bananas!* (2009), documents the process of refusing to lie down and be trampled over by dirty money, dirty smear campaigns and some of the dirtiest men…
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Film Review: ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel’
★★★★☆ Unless you’re a fashion aficionado, chances are you’ll have never heard of Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and irresistibly charismatic subject of Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s (her grandson’s partner) doc Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011). Her tale is so fantastical you’d be forgiven for thinking the majority of her life…
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Film Review: ‘Now Is Good’
★☆☆☆☆ Ol Parker follows up 2005’s Imagine Me & You with Now Is Good (2012), the tale of a young girl, Tessa (Dakota Fanning), who is dying of terminal leukaemia. With her treatment failing, Tessa decides to create a bucket-list, the top priority being to lose her virginity to the man of her dreams. Yet…
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Film Review: ‘Hysteria’
★★☆☆☆ It’s taken an entire decade for American filmmaker Tanya Wexler to complete her third feature, and on the evidence of the farcical Hysteria (2011), a further prolonged break from directing may have been preferable to all involved. Proclaiming to be a ‘sumptuous Victorian period piece’, whilst at the same time playing out with a…
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Film Review: ‘Untouchable’
★★★★☆ Having won a handful of prestigious awards and broken box office records across the globe, French Oscar entry Untouchable (The Intouchables, 2011) finally gets its UK release this week. Directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache and inspired by a true story, this French dramatic-comedy tells the story of the unlikely friendship between disabled…
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Film Review: ‘Savages’
★★★☆☆ Oliver Stone’s weed-fuelled crime caper Savages (2012) is probably the US director’s best offering since 1999’s Any Given Sunday, but after a thirteen year period of churning out substandard and forgettable efforts such as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), World Trade Center (2006) and the deplorable Alexander (2004), Stone bares all the hallmarks…
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Film Review: ‘Killing Them Softly’
★★★★☆ Palme d’Or nominee Killing Them Softly (2012) may only be Andrew Dominik’s third full-length feature, but already the Kiwi director has set himself aside as one of the industry’s brightest talents. Having taken a number of plaudits for his Antipodean debut Chopper (2000) and even more for his acclaimed 2007 western, The Assassination of…
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DVD Review: ‘Don Quixote’
★★★★☆ Released on DVD for the first time in the UK courtesy of Mr Bongo, Grigori Kozintsev’s big screen adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Don Kikhot, 1957) has long been regarded as the pre-eminent cinematic version of this literary classic. Beautifully imagined, Kozintsev’s depiction of the illustrious adventures of one of literature’s most…