Ben Nicholson

★★☆☆☆ Odenigbo (12 Years a Slave’s Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Olanna (Thandie Newton) are sat in uncomfortable silence at the dinner table before the quiet is pierced by a question: “Are we still trying to have a child?” This stuffy, uneasy scene – furnished with dialogue awkward and laboured – is regrettably Half of a Yellow…

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★★☆☆☆ The haunted house has become such a recurring trope in horror literature and cinema that it’s now a bona fide sub-genre in its own right. From modern semis to labyrinthine old mansions, there’s little that’s more innately spooky than feeling unnerved in one’s own home, while filmmakers have utilised that communal fear sublimely in…

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★★★☆☆ There’s a legend on the South American Galapagos Islands that the famous tortoises that inhabit their shores have the power to stare into the souls of men. These enormous reptiles are said to judge each new arrival on their archipelago, and curse those that alight there with nefarious intent. The question is raised whether…

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★★★★☆ After more than ten years and forty films at the Nikkatsu company through the 1950s and 60s, cult Japanese director Seijun Suzuki was fired – allegedly for making “incomprehensible” cinema. Known for visual panache, staccato editing and a particular dreamlike quality that eschewed narrative logic, he was hardly working against type. After repeated instruction…

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★★★☆☆ British auteur Peter Greenaway’s latest oddity, the elaborately titled Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), states its intentions in its opening minutes. A man dressed in immaculate period costume, replete with imposing coiffured barnet and an almost absurd European accent introduces himself directly to camera. This is Hendrik Goltzius, a Dutch printmaker being played…

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★★★★★ The passage of time and the examination of characters across decades is clearly something that interests director Richard Linklater. After meeting the characters of Céline and Jesse (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) in his romantic amble around Vienna, Before Sunrise (1995), he returned to them again in 2004 and 2013 to further explore both…

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★★★☆☆ Every year, thousands of newborns are abandoned in Morocco alone. Many of these instances occur as a result of the stigma attached to illegitimate children in Muslim countries – the product, as they are, of illegal sex out of wedlock. There is a subsequent status of social pariah thrust upon the mothers, with unyielding…

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★★★☆☆ With his 2011 debut, The Soul of Flies, director Jonathan Cenzual Burley crafted a whimsically enjoyable but flawed odyssey through rural Spain. For his follow-up, The Year and the Vineyard (2013), he’s ploughing rather similar soil with another dose of bucolic magical realism, inflected with gentle humour and endearing if inexpert performances. What is…

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★★★☆☆ It’s hard to describe Kim Sung-su’s epidemic thriller – out now on DVD here in the UK – without mentioning other well-known entries in the sub-genre. Outbreak (1995) and Steven Soderbergh’s skin-crawling Contagion (2011) are obvious touchstones for this action-packed tale of a lethal infection running rampant in urban South Korea. Whereas western outings…

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