Ben Nicholson

★☆☆☆☆ Hollywood has made a habit of reappropriating myths and fairytales, setting about debunking and demystifying them for modern audiences. The latest such icon to undergo this particular treatment of refinement is the son of Zeus himself, the mighty Hercules (2014). Dwayne Johnson might ably fill the demigod’s armour but the story labours to fill…

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★★★☆☆ Narrative is not even a remote concern for Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, the co-directors of the experimental mixed-media art documentary, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2014). Carved into three distinct acts, their film ostensibly follows the wanderings (or wonderings) of a man – musician and artist Robert A.A. Lowe – through…

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★★★★☆ Rigidity is both alpha and omega in Dietrich Brüggemann’s stark and startling new religious drama, Stations of the Cross (2014) which arrives in British cinemas this Friday on the back of much festival praise. With form echoing function it is aesthetically austere and structurally meticulous in telling the story of a young girl whose…

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★★★★☆ In the early 1920s, Douglas Fairbanks was transformed from comedy star into swash-buckling heartthrob via The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921) and Robin Hood (1922). Arguably one of the high-notes amongst his sensational ripping yarns is 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, a reworking of the Arabian Nights that gave ample opportunity…

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★★★★★ There is a scene part of the way through Hayao Miyazaki’s exceptional Spirited Away (2001) in which the young girl, Chihiro (voiced by Rumi Hiiragi) helps to bathe an odorous spirit that frequents the bathhouse in which she is forced to work. Her tenacity in serving a customer that everyone else has shunned is…

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★★★★★ A sprawling, almost empty hotel ensconced in the Anatolian steppes plays host to inhibited and isolated souls in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s captivating, slow burner, Winter Sleep (2014). A deserved winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Ceylan’s latest is a claustrophobic chamber piece spun out into a vast, rich and…

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★★★★☆ In his fantastic new documentary, Maidan (2014), revered Belarusian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa presents the public protest that eventually led to the toppling of the Ukranian premiere, Viktor Yanukovych, through a number of dichotomies. It is rigorous but unhurried; cool but compelling; faceless but personal; old-fashioned reportage and formally challenging modern cinema. Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti…

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★★★★☆ There aren’t many filmmakers who would want – let alone have the capacity – to make audiences gag and guffaw in equal measure. Even fewer would attempt to elicit such reactions simultaneously. A smaller number still would envisage doing so with a blackly comic tale of castration, cannibalism, masturbation and incest. Fortunately, for those…

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