Ben Nicholson
-
Toronto 2015: ‘Eva Doesn’t Sleep’ review
★★★★☆ The fate of Eva Perón’s body will surely go down as one of the more bizarre footnotes in history. Having been displayed to the public for two years while a monument was being built, Juan Perón was overthrown before she could be buried and the body went missing for over sixteen years. Its whereabouts…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘Bang Gang’ review
★★★☆☆ There are things both decidedly fresh and decidedly rote about Eva Husson’s hot-under-the-collar debut feature, Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (2015). The premise and aesthetic offer nothing decidedly innovative, but this is an intimate and tactile take on the familiar sexual awakening of a group of white middle-class teens with too much time…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘Yakuza Apocalypse’ review
★★☆☆☆ Where on Earth do you start with Takashi Miike’s latest offering Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)? Perhaps the best place is with two words that will immediately signal to many people whether or this a film that they might enjoy – with emphasis on the word ‘might’. Those words are ‘Yakuza Vampire’ and this symphony of…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘High-Rise’ review
★★★☆☆ “It takes a lot of determination to row against the current,” our polished protagonist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is informed upon his arrival in the soaring setting of Ben Wheatley’s J.G. Ballard adaptation, High-Rise (2015). Having moved into an apartment on the 25th floor, he’s surveying the scene at a 40th floor party, realising…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘Koza’ review
★★★☆☆ The distant memory of former glories fuels the tragicomedy of Ivan Ostrochovský’s fiction feature debut, Koza (2015). The title is the Slovak for ‘goat’ and was the nickname of protagonist Peter Baláž (himself), a boxer who represented his country at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. A pretty emotionally distant affair, Koza in some ways…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘Hardcore’ review
★★☆☆☆ If there’s something that can be said of Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s Midnight Madness violence-fest Hardcore (2015) it’s that you’re unlikely to see anything else like it, which deserves to be celebrated in and of itself. On the downside, its central gimmick does wear thin – and begin to grate on the eyes –…
-
Blu-ray Review: ‘Hard to Be a God’
★★★★☆ Aleksei German’s epic Dark Ages sci-fi Hard to Be a God (2013) took over a decade to make its way onto DVD and Blu-ray this week. Shot on-and-off for more than six years, the revered filmmaker regretfully passed away before the lengthy edit could be completed, but thanks to his wife and co-writer, Svetlana…
-
DVD Review: ‘The Dance of Reality’
★★★★☆ It’s been more than two decades since audiences last got to see a new film from visionary Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, with Frank Pavich’s documentary on an abandoned sci-fi epic – Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) – looking like being the closet they might get. Now comes The Dance of Reality (2013), an absurdist dreamscape of…
-
DVD Review: ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’
★★★★☆ There was a shot in Joss Whedon’s box office behemoth Avengers Assemble (2012) which set fan’s tongues a-wagging when it popped up in a trailer. The camera panned around the team of superheroes as they regrouped against an overwhelming alien hoard. If sequels are supposed to be bigger and better, then its lucky that…
-
Toronto 2015: ‘The Witch’ review
★★★★☆ Old hags, horned deceivers and scary forests have all been done to death and it’s easy to see why audiences might tire of revisiting the same old tropes in new horror. ‘Twould be best to banish such doubts where Robert Eggers’ brooding debut feature and Sundance hit The Witch (2015) is concerned, however. It…
