Adam Lowes

★★☆☆☆ The 1960s were chock-full of fascinating musical figures, many of whom with larger-than-life tales to tell, yet director Allison Anders uses a fictitious counterpart (said to be loosely based on Carol King) as the basis of her follow up to failed anthology comedy, Four Rooms (1995). Now released on DVD for the first time,…

Continue

★★★☆☆ This handsome-looking Canadian feature boasts an impressive cast and director François Girard is well-versed in musical milieu (Girard was behind the unconventional but highly acclaimed 1993 biopic Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould), but The Choir (2014) is a fairly airless coming-of-age tale whose exquisite, ethereal soundtrack often manages to tug at those…

Continue

★★★☆☆ It’s always interesting to learn that an actor has taken on the directorial challenge. What makes Just Jim (2015) pretty remarkable is unlike those who had spent considerable time performing before making the leap (under the tutelage of Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, Eastwood had hit forty when he directed Play Misty For Me…

Continue

★★★☆☆ It may be a stretch to herald The Goob (2014) as an East Anglian Gummo but it certainly shares some similarities with Harmony Korine’s debut. The flat, dusty Norfolk setting is the type of landscape seldom represented in UK cinema, and there are moments when it feels like you’re watching a US Midwestern counterpart.…

Continue

★☆☆☆☆ Tobe Hooper has enjoyed an erratic career, but even some of his lesser titles manage to be sporadically entertaining. Eaten Alive (1976) is the exception. A follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Hooper swaps the vérité terror of that horror masterpiece for a stagy, plodding slice of wannabe southern Gothic-cum-grubby exploitation flick.…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ As yet another slinky jazz number kicks in and that all-too-familiar credit typeface appears, there’s still something undeniably comforting about slipping back into a Woody Allen film. Irrational Man (2015), his 45th feature, starts off promisingly enough. The type of darker morality play Allen likes to roll out every so often, there’s a nice…

Continue

★★★☆☆ Fact and fiction intertwine in Medium Cool (1969), the combustible feature debut of celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler. This impeccable, director-approved transfer really helps underscore the rawness and urgency of a flawed but dynamic piece of politically-charged vérité. A loose narrative is framed within the lead up to the actual 1968 Democratic National Convention in…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ Run All Night (2015), the latest addition to the ongoing Neesploitation cycle, feels like a film which Warner Bros. fell madly in love with at pitch stage, sought out an established action director and courted a major A-list star before grappling with the awkward reality that the damn thing simply doesn’t hang together. Every action…

Continue

★★★★☆ The latter part of that old adage about never working with children or animals has been taken on and smashed beyond all recognition in the strikingly original Hungarian parable White God (2014). What starts off as what could be only be described as a dark reboot of The Incredible Journey, directed by Lukas Moodysson,…

Continue

★★★★☆ From the moody opening – a beautifully orchestrated slow-motion (and mostly silent) attack on a neon-lit nightclub – it’s immediately clear that Hyena (2014) is a film which is reaching for something outside of the usual overcooked efforts from a largely saturated genre. It offers the kind of brooding, full-bodied police corruption yarn that…

Continue