Ben Nicholson

★★★★☆ The opening moments of Nick Broomfield’s Oscar long-listed documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014), call to mind the narrative inspiration for recent podcast, Serial. Pitching up in South Central L.A. in search of the story behind the eponymous serial killer, Broomfield is met with strident claims that the man awaiting trial has been…

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★★★☆☆ Comic book adaptations are fast becoming a staple element in the diet of blockbuster cinemagoers and, despite already owning Marvel, Disney have now decided to get in on the action themselves. Their first foray into the superhero universe comes in the eminently cuddly form of the inflatable robot Baymax (Scott Adsit), whose Kuleshov care…

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★★★★★ Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985) took 12 years to make. Compiling over 350 hours of footage, including interviews with individuals in 14 countries, the final cut – released anew on Blu-ray for Eureka’s Masters of Cinema Collection – clocks in at over 9 hours. It’s fascinating how the mind’s immediate reaction to…

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★★★★☆ With just three films J.C. Chandor has managed to prove himself a director capable of morphing to suit his subject matter. Margin Call (2011) was dialogue-heavy and cerebral, reflected in the computer screens and shimmering steel and glass of the surroundings. In the far more elemental All Is Lost (2013) the sea was the…

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★★★★★ Within its opening premise, the concept of a utopian Freedonia, the Marx Brothers’ glorious Duck Soup (1933) is already flinging mud in the eye of Western democracy. Bankrupt, the aforementioned country’s lofty name is skewered when it is hauled back into the black by its richest citizen, Mrs. Teasdale. She insists on replacing the…

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★★★★☆ Since as far back as his third feature, 1997’s Ossos, the work of auteur Pedro Costa has frequently explored the troubled Lisbon district of Fontainhas. In a loose trilogy he has chronicled the existential wanderings of impoverished immigrants, most recently in Colossal Youth (2006), which focused on the Cape Verdean Ventura. Costa is once…

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★★☆☆☆ Nordic noir has been doing brisk trade on both page and screen over the last few years, cannily stimulating an apparently global appetite for a slew of flawed detectives and macabre investigations from the region. Although there have been some successful cinematic outings, it is actually on the small screen that the genre has…

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★★★☆☆ The ocean is vast and filled with peril, but it is the foolhardy resilience of men that proves the crux of Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s cinematic voyage, Kon-Tiki (2012). Norway’s most expensive production to date, it was nominated for last year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and now receives a UK release with…

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★★★★☆ Last year, the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab swallowed screens with their briny and disorientating fish-eye-view experience, Leviathan (2012). When their latest film, Manakamana (2013) opens in the pitch dark to the whirring of mechanical winches audiences may be forgiven for wondering if they should expect more of the same. However, light bursts forth and…

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★★★★★ The release of D.W. Griffiths’ technically dazzling and morally contemptuous The Birth of a Nation in 1915 provoked outrage from the American public. Archaic racial stereotypes were roundly condemned, and according to legend this reaction partly prompted the themes of his next film, the epic and ambitious Intolerance (1916). Subtitled ‘Love’s Struggle Throughout the…

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