Ben Nicholson

★★☆☆☆ Post-apocalyptic dystopias have been somewhat en vogue in recent years, with the cinematic sci-fi landscape positively cluttered with barren and sparsely populated visions of Earth’s tragic future. That party has now been joined by Joseph Kosinski, who cut his directorial teeth on Tron: Legacy (2010) and whose sophomore feature, Oblivion (2012), arrives on DVD…

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★★★☆☆ “If you ask the Chinese for an apple, they’ll give you a grape; if you ask for a watermelon, then they’ll give you an apple.” This analogy is used by a commentator in Dirk Simon’s sobering documentary When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun (2010) to elucidate his stance on Tibetan independence. He posits that…

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★★★★☆ American director Darren Aronofsky has long probed minds caught in the vice-like grip of obsession; from the entropic addiction of Requiem for a Dream (2000) to the compulsive performers of The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010). His own personal preoccupation was evident from provocative debut film Pi (1998), which receives a 15th Anniversary…

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★★☆☆☆ Having bagged the prestigious Palme d’Or prize for his last film, 2008’s vérité high school drama The Class, award-winning French director Laurent Cantet returns to selected UK cinemas this week with his new feature, Foxfire (2012). Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, it shares some themes with the director’s previous…

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★★☆☆☆ Heard on radios and seen in books since the 1930s, a masked lawman and his faithful Native American sidekick galloped into hearts and minds with an iconic 50s TV show. Disney have now charged the team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise with doing for cowboys what they managed with buccaneers. Thus, the…

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★★★☆☆ Directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn have defied the conventional sobriety of a film about ‘the Troubles’ in their Belfast-set music biopic, Good Vibrations (2012). Without shying away from the darker aspects of the city in the 1970s, their story is concerned with one man who believed music could make a difference in…

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★★★★★ It would be something of an understatement to label D.W. Griffith’s American Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), as controversial. The film became infamous due to its overt racism and negative stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans, coupled with the rampant glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, causing widespread outcry. Such was the…

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★★★★☆ Steven Soderbergh has made something of a habit over the past few years of threatening his departure from the cinematic arena. A fiercely independent filmmaker who has found getting his visions onto the screen more and more difficult, this year he had announced as his retirement from the medium. Prior to the acclaimed Liberace…

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★★★★☆ If gaining an understanding of the motivation behind the distressing acts committed in 2009’s The Cove wasn’t enough to put audiences off a trip to a marine park, then Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish (2013) may just do the trick. Opening to a harrowing 911 call, the film hardly lets up as it attempts to shine…

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★★★★☆ The Taviani brothers explored a Shakespeare production performed by a group of prison inmates earlier in the year with Caesar Must Die (2012). Matteo Garrone, who arrived on the international scene to great acclaim with hard-hitting Mafioso drama Gomorrah (2008), has now gone one step further. Out on DVD this week is Reality (2012),…

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