Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: Female Prisoner Scorpion
★★★★☆ “Wanted for the murder of 8 police officers, 3 prison breaks, and 28 attempts…She’s evil incarnate!” This is how a detective describes Nami Matsushima (the iconic Meiko Kaji), better known as Matsu, or by her semi-mythic prisoner name ‘Scorpion’, by the time the fourth film in this quick-fire franchise rolls around. All released in…
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Film Review: Suicide Squad
★★☆☆☆ It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was intended to kickstart a new behemoth of franchise movie-making, introducing the world to the mythic heroism of the DC Universe. Then, like a punk-rock palette cleanser, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was due to swoop in with colour and verve, telling…
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Film Review: Bobby Sands: 66 Days
★★★☆☆ “It’s not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.” These words by Irish author and politician Terence MacSwiney, who died during a hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920, resound throughout Brendan J. Byrne’s thoughtful, thorough and even-handed new documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days. This…
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DVD Review: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
★★☆☆☆ When the suits at Warner Bros. managed to convince Christopher Nolan to spearhead a new Superman movie and kickstart DC’s cinematic universe, they surely can’t have envisioned something like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice rocking onto screens just a few short years later. Man of Steel reimagined the big blue boy-scout in a…
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Film Review: The Hard Stop
★★★★☆ To open his new documentary The Hard Stop, George Amponsah uses a Martin Luther King quote that acts almost as a catalyst for what follows: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s with a view to providing the unheard with a voice that the filmmaker sought to understand the 2011 London riots…
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KVIFF 2016: The Noonday Witch review
★★★☆☆ Shimmering corn fields and the blazing midday sun may not seem like natural environs for spooky supernatural horror, but Jiří Sádek’s The Noonday Witch employs them to suitably disconcerting effect. With a tinge of Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin, it re-purposes a traditional Slavic folktale into the conventions of modern horror.
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KVIFF 2016: 5 October review
★★★☆☆ “I don’t know where I’m going,” writes Ján Kollár in his diary. He’s recently been booked in for surgery, his chances of surviving it are 50/50, and he has now set off on a literal and philosophical wander in the time he knows he has left. All of this is learned from his diary…
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KVIFF 2016: We Are Never Alone review
★★☆☆☆ Petr Václav’s latest film We Are Never Alone may represent his career thus far in microcosm. It folds in the Roma subject matter of his lauded debut Marian; Karel Roden and Lenka Vlasáková star as a despairing couple, much like in Parallel Worlds; and Klaudia Dudová, the lead actress from recent hit The Way…
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KVIFF 2016: Family Film review
★★★★☆ Don’t be fooled by the banal title – there’s a great deal of interest beneath the pastel hues and fine furnishings of Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu’s Family Film. Indeed, the title itself is the first of many sardonic misdirections in a piece whose screenplay delights in about-turns and ratcheting melodrama.
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KVIFF 2016: Eva Nová review
★★★★☆ “Everyone says: ‘Less emotion, less emotion.’ How can anyone act without emotion?” So complains the eponymous veteran actress in Slovakian drama Eva Nová. She’s lamenting her plight; unemployed and at the mercy of modern, young directors and contemporary conventions towards minimalism.