Adam Lowes

★★★★☆ Renowned horror auteur George A. Romero moved out of his comfort zone with Knightriders, a weirdly touching and wonderfully offbeat drama from 1981, which defies categorisation in many ways. At its heart, there’s an Easy Rider-like study of free-spirited, principled ideals within an increasingly conformist and capitalist society. A youthful-looking Ed Harris plays Billy…

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★★★★★ A huge box office earner in its native Ireland last year, Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did (2012) went on to sweep the board at January’s Irish Film and Television Awards. What’s more, both the financial success and critical accolades are entirely justifiable. It’s seldom you see a coming-of-age film which capture the behaviour of…

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★★★☆☆ What starts as a sexy, May-September romance turns into an involving and studied look at post-911 prejudice and paranoia. Flying Blind (2012) is the feature-length debut of Polish shorts director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, and features a career-best performance from Brit Helen McCrory. McCrory plays Frankie, a successful middle-aged employee of an aerospace company who have…

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★★★☆☆ Resembling a neon-drenched, coming-of-age version of Mad Max (1979), Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In (1986) has all the familiar Ozploitation trappings. There’s gratuitous nudity, sporadic bursts of violence and some truly outrageous stunt work (including the most astounding car jump ever committed to film). Yet, amongst all, it’s also a strange and surreal commentary…

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★★★★☆ Taking the cinematic conventions of the road movie and weaving them into an intimate portrayal of a family on the brink of breakup, Thursday Till Sunday (De jueves a domingo, 2012) is a well-acted and heartfelt coming-of-age tale. Ten year-old Lucia (Santi Ahumada) and younger brother Manuel (Emiliano Freifeld) set off on a trip…

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★★★☆☆ This week, Aaron Eckhart throws his hat into the cerebral action hero ring for Philipp Stölzl’s The Expatriate, an American espionage thriller which has more than a whiff of déjà vu about it. Imagine a less icily-efficient Jason Bourne, with a petulant daughter in tow, and you’re somewhere close to what’s offered up here.

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★★★★☆ This March/April sees the BFI pay tribute to one of the UK’s most enduring and beloved directors. John Boorman has never been the type of filmmaker to be tied to one genre, hopping between a number of diverse projects which have ranged from the world of science fiction/fantasy (1974’s truly mind-bending Zardoz) to the…

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★★★☆☆ Arrow Video continues their quest to unearth respected, semi-forgotten genre works and give them a loving home on DVD and Blu-ray with Wes Craven’s 1981 religious horror-drama, Deadly Blessing. A young farmer, excommunicated from his family who are involved in an archaic, fire and brimstone religious sect called ‘the Hittites’ (who, according to one character,…

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★☆☆☆☆ It’s certainly still early days, but the poorest British film of the year may just be about to rear its repugnant head (and we’re not referring back to Danny Dyer farce Run for Your Wife). Sara Sugarman’s Vinyl (2012) wants to be a breezy tale of old rockers sticking it to the ‘man’. Sadly, it turns…

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★★☆☆☆ The debut directorial effort from Alex Kurtzman, one half of the Hollywood scriptwriting powerhouse behind J. J. Abrams’ recent Star Trek reboot and many other high-profile genre works (his co-scribe, Roberto Orci, is also credited as one of the authors here), 2012’s People Like Us claims to be ‘inspired by true events’. Unfortunately, it…

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