Adam Lowes

★★★★☆ Take your seats for the next performance of Eugenio Mira’s preposterous but breathlessly entertaining thriller, Grand Piano (2013). It’s a genre piece packed with the kind of knowing Hitchcockian thrills peddled by Mira’s fellow Spanish contemporaries like Guillem Morales (Julia’s Eyes) and J. A. Bayona (The Orphanage), but the USP here is the additional…

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★★★★☆ Decades before the phrase was put through the commercial wringer, hipster culture was brought to the fore via the films of singular US filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. A guiding light in the burgeoning independent scene of the 1980s, Jarmusch’s efforts are being recognised at the BFI via a well-earned retrospective entitled Jim Jarmusch and Friends,…

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★★★★☆ In director Joe Dante’s endearing 1989 horror comedy The ‘Burbs, starring Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher, “love thy neighbour” is a term mostly adhered to by the residents of Mayfield Place. Living out a relatively peaceful existence in their quiet cul-de-sac, save for the odd lawn care disputes, the arrival of the mysterious Klopeks…

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★★☆☆☆ Nicholas Stoller’s 2014 US comedy Bad Neighbours is a tired and contrived effort which once again posits Rogen as an adult fighting with his adolescent urges (a character trait which first emerged seven years back with Knocked Up) in a routine which is really beginning to grow stale. Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose…

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★★☆☆☆ In the wake of Academy Award-winning American actor Robin Williams’ tragic and untimely death last month, it was arguably the work outside of his zany and larger-than-life persona that fans responded to most whilst playing tribute to the man. Like those films, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of little-known Israeli film The 92 Minutes of…

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★★★☆☆ The BFI really do take an exhaustive approach to their film seasons. To tie-in with the forthcoming Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder, they have ventured deep into the BBC archives to unearth this classic piece of children’s small screen sci-fi. The Boy from Space was a ten-part serial attached to educational series Look…

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★★☆☆☆ Having one of your lead characters nonchalantly reference Jim Thompson, surely the master of twisted, sweaty Southern noir fiction, means you’re already setting yourself up for a potential fall awfully quickly. This, unfortunately, is precisely what sibling directing duo Simon and Zeke Hawkins do with We Gotta Get Out of This Place (2013), a…

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★★★☆☆ French actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet’s first foray into English-language cinema, Blood Ties (2013) is a self-consciously styled paean to 1970s cinema – namely the New York crime yarn. Though adapted from Bruno and Michel Papet’s novel Les liens du sang, it bears many of the trademarks of co-writer James Gray’s own work as a director;…

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★★★☆☆ A Parisian romantic comedy sprinkled with more than a touch of whimsy, Agnès Jaoui’s Under the Rainbow (2013) reaches for an Allen-like vibe amongst its array of love-starved characters but only partly succeeds in achieving this. Laura (Agathe Bonitzer) has a reoccurring dream where she is living a fairytale existence which ends with a…

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★★★★☆ The young male inmate rallying against the system is hardly untapped territory in film, but with Starred Up (2013) writer Jonathan Asser and director David Mackenzie have succeeded in putting a fresh spin on that schema, bolstered further by a powerhouse performance from Skins graduate Jack O’Connell. It’s no surprise that the likes of…

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