Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: ‘Four Corners’
★★☆☆☆ Chess has always leant itself kindly to cinema, affording both wider allegorical application and pleasing visual opportunities. Four Corners (2013) is the second film to arrive on British shores this year juxtaposing the ease with which a chess-whizz can navigate those sixty-four squares and the hardships endured away from the board. The previous entry…
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DVD Review: ‘American Sniper’
★★☆☆☆ In American Sniper (2014), Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) insists on keeping both eyes open when peering through the sights of his rifle. His reasoning is sound; to keep a weather eye on the rest of his surroundings. As director, Clint Eastwood seems to have ignored that advice, instead allowing his protagonist’s telescopic…
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Film Review: ‘The Dead Lands’
★★★☆☆ There’s much to be said for genre films that strip things back to their fundamental elements and hit the ground running, shorn of all contrivances and elaborate special effects. Whilst much is going on in Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands (2014), it is primarily a lean and undeniably brutal actioner that claims to be…
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Film Review: ‘Danny Collins’
★★☆☆☆ “I was the real thing once” claims the title character in Dan Fogelman’s misfiring dramedy Danny Collins (2015). Played by Al Pacino (who else?), Collins was a once-promising folk singer who has leveraged his talent against a bleach-blonde trophy girlfriend, a vacuous mansion, and a limitless supply of booze and drugs. Whilst this may…
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DVD Review: ‘Polish Cinema Classics Vol.III’
★★★★☆ “Polish films are… boring…” claims Engineer Mamon in Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970), widely considered the country’s original ‘cult’ film. A tongue-in-cheek microcosm of the Communist state in which it was produced, it sits perfectly within the third volume of Second Run’s excellent Polish Cinema Classics series alongside Krzysztof Zanussi’s Camouflage (1977) and Wojciech…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Promised Land’ review
★★★★★ It has been sixty years since the release of Andrzej Wajda’s first film, Generation (1955), and in that time he has directed over fifty more. 1975’s The Promised Land, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, is one of his very best. That’s no mean feat in a…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Last Day of Summer’ review
★★★★☆ Novelist turned filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki excelled at crafting an atmosphere of the otherworldly on the screen. Though 1965’s Jump may be more widely known and highly regarded, a similar milieu pervades The Last Day of Summer (1958), Konwici’s first film behind the camera. Ostensibly a straightforward relationship drama far more in the social realist…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Austeria’ review
★★★★☆ There’s a moment of cinematic perfection around forty minutes into Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Austeria (1981). It’s an instant of the kind of visual poetry that enlivens the medium in the viewer’s mind and reminds us of the simple potency that film can have in the hands of a real master. A girl runs through a…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ review
★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended and the entire country went through a process of comparable liberalisation that naturally extended to the filmmaking community. Free of the constraints placed upon the medium by the Soviet Union –…
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Film Review: ‘Spring’
★★★☆☆ Variations of metamorphoses are the underlying catalysts in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s sophomore feature, Spring (2014). It plays like a reinvention of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961) inflected with modern indie sensibilities and viewed through a burnished Instagram filter. Much like Dennis Hopper’s Johnny in that film, Spring‘s Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) is…