Ben Nicholson
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’
★★★★☆ Walerian Borowczyk is a filmmaker whose enduring reputation was far from guaranteed. Initially heralded as a cinematic genius upon his emergence in the 1950s, his later career saw him pigeon-holed as a pornographer. It’s not been until recently that his name has been somewhat rehabilitated. Following a wonderful Blu-ray collection of his work released…
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Film Review: ‘Only Angels Have Wings’
★★★★☆ “A man can die but once; we owe God a death.” Shakespeare’s Henry IV provides the basis for the poetic expression of the fatalistic storm ever brewing on the horizon of Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939). “If we pay it today, we don’t owe it tomorrow,” goes the typically practical Hawksian suffix.…
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Film Review: ‘A Fuller Life’
★★★☆☆ Ron Mann’s Altman (2014) chose to look at the director’s career largely through his own eyes, combining archive material and interviews together with the recollections of friends and family. A Fuller Life (2013) is another biographical doc about a master of independent American cinema, but Samantha Fuller’s affectionate portrait of her father Samuel goes…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Night Train’ review
★★★★☆ For his sixth feature, renowned Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz decided to board the Night Train (1959), inspired by his frequent trips to woo actress Lucyna Winnicka. She would star in the resulting thriller which was to prove no mere potboiler, but instead the chance to put his characters in an intense pressure cooker of…
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DVD Review: ‘The Theory of Everything’
★★★☆☆ Cosmology is “kind of a religion for intelligent atheists” attests a rangy young Stephen Hawking (Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne) when describing his field of interest to the beautiful Jane (Felicity Jones) at a Cambridge University mixer in the early 1960s. It proves not to be quite such a draw for James Marsh’s biopic…
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Film Review: ‘Still’
★★☆☆☆ The cinematic spectre of the terrifying hoodie rears its head once again in Simon Blake’s debut feature, Still (2014), which is in cinemas now. At its centre is a startling performance filled with conflict and nuance from the ever-excellent Aidan Gillen (best known for television’s Game of Thrones), but it’s the tug-of-war between atmospheric…
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Film Review: ‘Samba’
★★★☆☆ Trying to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time is always an unenviable task. That was the challenge laid out to directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano as they seek to follow-up on the massive critical and commercial success of 2011’s Untouchable, a light and hugely enjoyable odd-couple tale. Unsurprisingly, they have…
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Film Review: ‘Elsa & Fred’
★★★☆☆ Over the past few years, the film industry’s realisation that profits lie with a swathe of older viewers – the coined term is ‘the grey pound’ – has led to a plethora of films aimed squarely in their direction. The UK has seen big hits like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) which have…
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Film Review: ‘Born of War’
★★☆☆☆ Quote: “You can stand up for a principle and you can die, or you can walk away and live.” This somewhat awkward line from a new low-budget British thriller, Born of War (2013), illustrates the tension at the heart of Vicky Jewson’s sophomore feature. On one hand, it’s an attempt to explore the murky…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Jump’ review
★★★☆☆ Surreality dons a cool sixties swagger in Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki’s intriguing and vaguely baffling Jump (1965). Abandoning the social realism with which many of his cinematic compatriots approached the medium in the aftermath of the war – and with which he initially made his name in print – he creates an elliptical and…
