Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: ‘Spring in a Small Town’
★★★★★ This year, the BFI has embarked on a glorious season of screenings that celebrate the last one hundred years of Chinese cinema. Acting as something of a centrepiece is a film that they have been attempting to licence for UK distribution for years, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948). Often considered its…
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Film Review: ‘Leave to Remain’
★★★☆☆ Immigration has been a hot topic of late, with the fluidity of British borders given a great deal of political capital. It’s into this atmosphere that the feature debut of documentary man Bruce Goodison arrives in cinemas, delving into the somewhat unexplored subject of teenage asylum seekers in the UK. Part of an ongoing…
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Film Review: ‘Pluto’
★★★☆☆ The quote proudly displayed in the foyer of the Se Young High School that plays host to Shin Su-won’s Pluto (2012) is a far cry from the scholarly benchmark that welcomed guests to Plato’s Academy. “Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.”…
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Film Review: ‘The Dirties’
★★★★☆ Bringing subjects such as teenage bullying and, more controversial still, high school massacres to the big screen is always a perilous affair. As such, the decision of 22-year-old first-time Canadian director Matt Johnson to tackle both issues – and through the stylistic trappings of the found footage genre, no less – was a bold…
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Film Review: ’22 Jump Street’
★★★★☆ When Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum tumbled onto screens in 2012’s 21 Jump Street, a movie reboot of the TV show that launched Johnny Depp’s career twenty-five years earlier, expectations had understandably been tempered. The leads were likable enough, but the concept seemed weak and the direction was squarely in the untested hands of…
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Interview: Alain Guiraudie, ‘Stranger by the Lake’
Since it first premièred at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) has gone on to garner both audience and critical acclaim in its native France and further abroad. Appearing in the Un Certain Regard strand on the Croisette, Stranger bagged its helmsman the Best Director Award as…
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DocHouse Presents: Pipeline review
★★★★☆ “50% of Russia’s budget comes from the oil and gas industry,” asserts the quote – attributed to Vladimir Putin – that opens Russian documentary Pipeline (2013). Director Vitaly Mansky traces the path of the cash cow that is the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgirid pipeline, glimpsing the lives encountered en route. The conduit stretches for almost 3,000 miles,…
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Film Review: ‘Edge of Tomorrow’
★★★☆☆ Alien invasions have long been the scourge of the cinematic planet Earth and those pesky tentacled critters are up to their old tricks again in Doug Liman’s entertaining time-hopping sci-fi actioner Edge of Tomorrow (2014). Based on Japanese writer Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s slender novel All You Need is Kill, the film stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt…
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Film Review: ‘Heli’
★★★☆☆ Despite an audacious scene near its midpoint that will undoubtedly prompt much tongue-wagging, Amat Escalante’s third feature, Heli (2013), is largely about just how commonplace unexceptional cruelty and bloodshed has become in his native Mexico. His previous film, Los Bastardos (2008), concerned a shocking act of violence committed impassively by two immigrant labourers in…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Cat Returns’ & ‘Princess Mononoke’
★★★★☆ The month of May has seen the cinematic world both celebrating and lamenting as the career of master animator Hayao Miyazaki came to an end with his skyborne swansong, The Wind Rises (2013). As the man referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney retires, attention is very much focused on the future, and past,…