CineVue
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Tango Lesson’
★★★☆☆ This month sees the rerelease of Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997) on both DVD and Blu-ray. Famous for her generation and gender-swapping 1992 drama Orlando, which starred Tilda Swinton, Potter is a director notorious for her reluctance to conform to the archetypal templates of Hollywood filmmaking. A director named Sally (Potter) visits Paris…
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DVD Review: ‘Corpo Celeste’
★★★★☆ Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature Corpo Celeste (2011) is a gently confident story of a young girl, attempting to survive her adolescence and understand her faith against the backdrop of an alien Italian community. Thirteen-year-old Marta (Yle Vianello) returns to southern Italy with her mother and older sister after spending her childhood in…
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DVD Review: ‘Goodbye First Love’
★★★☆☆ French director Mia Hansen-Løve has managed to collate substantial critical goodwill over the course of her short career, thanks in part to the success over her previous film, 2009’s Father of My Child. Hansen-Løve returned earlier this year with the loosely autobiographical Goodbye First Love (2011), a more sedate, at times watery account of…
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DVD Review: ‘The Turin Horse’
★★★★☆ Cinephiles’ commitment to austere, ‘slow cinema’ faces a new challenge with the release on DVD of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), told with the typically repetitive, yet sumptuous quality that audiences have come to expect from the Hungarian director. The film opens with the account of a small moment in the life of…
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DVD Review: ‘The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists’
★★★★☆ Aardman is back doing what it does best with the tremendously fun and silly The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012), a stop-motion claymation adventure set on the high seas, out now on DVD and Blu-ray. Star of the film – the vain, yet lovable Pirate Captain (suitably voiced by Hugh Grant at…
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DVD Review: ‘Nostalgia for the Light’
★★★★☆ With the recent economic climate resulting in the current cinematic release schedule becoming saturated with affordable, yet no-less poignant documentaries it comes as a refreshing change to see a film like Nostalgia For The Light (2011), Patricio Guzmán’s philosophical venture into his countries troubled history.Guzmán’s film is shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where renowned…
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Blu-ray Review: StudioCanal Collection
★★★★☆ The 2012 StudioCanal Collection brings together some of cinema’s most iconic films, both past and present. The latest classics to make their way onto Blu-ray courtesy of the UK distributor’s 5000-strong catalogue of titles come from Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel and Marcel Carné in the forms of The Trial (1962), That Obscure Object of…
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DVD Review: ‘Safe’
★★★☆☆ Jason Statham (aka ‘the Stath’) returns to the action fold with Safe (2012), a mostly by-the-numbers, yet surprisingly involving and dynamic thriller from writer/director Boaz Yakin. The film centres on Statham’s Luke Wright, an ex-cop who, after stumbling upon a prized 12-year-old Chinese girl called Mei (Catherine Chan), finds himself caught up in a…
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DVD Review: ‘American Pie: Reunion’
★☆☆☆☆ Casually disregarding four previous non-canonical franchise outings (Band Camp, The Naked Mile et al), American Pie: Reunion (2011) returns to the characters and relationships of the original American Pie story, for apparently one last slice of smut and nostalgic camaraderie. Directed by series newcomers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, Reunion willingly slips into the…
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Film Review: ‘The Queen of Versailles’
★★★★☆ As a razor-sharp satire on the American obsession with all things ‘big’, director Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles (2012) is, quite frankly, jaw-dropping. As a car-crash depiction of the strained relationships of a family fixated with the accumulation of wealth and possessions however, the film is as mesmerising as it is shocking.David…