Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: ‘Stories We Tell’
★★★★☆ Having experienced success in front of the camera, Canadian actress Sarah Polley has now made a successful transition to a role behind it. After two fictional narrative features, her attention has now shifted to the narrative of her own kith and kin in engrossing documentary Stories We Tell (2012). Pitched as an investigation into…
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DVD Review: ‘Everybody Has a Plan’
★★☆☆☆ Viggo Mortensen rises to the challenge of playing twins in Argentinian director Ana Piterberg’s debut feature Everybody Has a Plan (2012) – even if the drama never quite rises to meet his beguiling performance. It’s not the actor’s first role in Spanish, but it is his first in the country in which he lived…
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DocHouse Presents: Our Nixon review
★★★☆☆ Inside the Nixon White House, three of the former-US president’s most senior aides were enthusiastic amateur filmmakers. Between them, they managed to amass over 500 reels of Super 8 footage detailing everything from state visits to staff garden parties. Having been seized by the FBI during the investigations into the Watergate scandal, those videos…
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Film Review: ‘Kelly + Victor’
★★☆☆☆ Two attractive strangers lock eyes across the floor of a Liverpool nightclub. On their way back to her place, she ominously informs him that their respective star signs promise sex that will either be devastatingly good, or just plain devastating. What follows details the perilously destructive fling of the titular Kelly + Victor (2013).…
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Film Review: ‘Hawking’
★★★☆☆ When celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was at school, he was nicknamed “Einstein” but only considered to be at about the middle of his class; he likes to think they were a pretty clever class. Anecdotes and observations pepper Hawking (2013), an autobiographical documentary written and narrated by the man himself and compiled by…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Sweet Hereafter’
★★★★☆ Throughout his early career, Canadian independent filmmaker Atom Egoyan repeatedly zeroed in on the effects of loss upon those left behind. This theme received its most pronounced treatment in his most critically heralded piece, The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which now arrives on DVD and Blu-ray from UK distributors Artificial Eye. Starring Brit Ian Holm,…
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DVD Review: ‘Thérèse Desqueyroux’
★★★☆☆ Audrey Tautou has never quite cast off the elfin shadow of her breakout role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001). Over the past decade, she’s taken on her fair share of more austere roles, and few have seen her turn a performance as restrained as in Thérèse Desqueyroux (2012) – out now on DVD and…
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Film Review: ‘The Great Hip Hop Hoax’
★★★☆☆ In the mid-noughties, hip-hop outfit Silibil n’ Brains arrived in London from California with the dream of conquering the British music industry. At their first gig, their energy and humour got them spotted by a label and they had soon signed to a highly influential manager. Recording space was promptly arranged and hype had…
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Film Review: ‘Jadoo’
★★★☆☆ Released in UK cinemas this week following a world premiere in Berlin earlier this year comes light-hearted British delicacy Jadoo (2013), from the team behind 2011’s Resistance. Trading the rolling hills of the Welsh countryside for an urban setting, the director, Amit Gupta, returns back to his roots with his second feature. Portraying competing…
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DVD Review: ‘Compliance’
★★★★☆ The stretched credulity of cinematic narratives can often leave audiences agog as bizarrely motivated characters behave in inexplicable ways. In his provocative second feature, Compliance (2012), director Craig Zobel creates a highly uncomfortable atmosphere precisely because his film’s plot is nigh on impossible to believe, despite the fact that it’s based on actual events.…