Ben Nicholson
-
DVD Review: Memories of Underdevelopment
★★★★☆ Regularly heralded as the greatest Cuban film of all time, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment is a ranging, challenging work. A cine-essay blend of fictional narrative and documentary observation, it stands out even in the febrile atmosphere of post-revolutionary Cuba. The 1960s saw a number of widely touted films from what is often…
-
Film Review: Multiple Maniacs
★★★☆☆ It’s testament to John Waters’ determination to push the boundaries of perceived decency that his 1970 sophomore feature, Multiple Maniacs, remains shocking to this day. On its initial release it played at grimy midnight cinemas – completely fitting for its guerrilla style and transgressive content. After long being considered lost, it was lovingly restored…
-
Film Review: Moonlight
★★★★★ A coming-of-age tale in three parts, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a rich and profound character study grappling with questions of race, masculinity, sexuality, class, and love with unerring confidence and poetry. It has taken Jenkins eight years to follow-up his debut Medicine for Melancholy but his adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight…
-
DVD Review: Cameraperson
★★★★☆ In Ways of Seeing, the late art critic John Berger speaks about the evolution of how we understand images and the point at which “the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognised as part of the vision. An image became a record of how X had seen Y.” Such a consideration lies at…
-
Feature: Ten stage-to-screen adaptations
Theatre and cinema are inextricable. From it’s earliest days, film has borrowed conventions, genres, personnel and even material from the stage and over the past century that relationship has grown in complexity and influences have travelled in both directions. Still, alongside other media – including literature, comic books, television shows, paintings – plays are regularly…
-
DVD Review: Two films by Marc Isaacs
★★★★☆ Philip is a self-professed king, ordained directly by God and living with a harem of wives on a horse farm in Sussex. Laura-Anne is a ten-year-old girl searching for love in the windswept two-street town of Siddick in Cumbria. As protagonists in a pair of films by British documentarian Marc Isaacs, they may seem…
-
Film Review: Christine
★★★★☆ Christine Chubbuck used to be a name you were most likely to come across on an internet listicle about the strangest things to have been seen on television. That was until not one but two films about her premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. One was Robert Greene’s documentary Kate Plays Christine, which…
-
Film Review: Rats
★★★☆☆ Cinema is littered with films that have pitted man against some terrifying beast from the animal kingdom. Genre flicks have seen us hunted by wolves, sharks, snakes, bears and birds. Morgan Spurlock’s new film Rats puts a different spin on this familiar trope, however, because it’s not just some science-fiction about rodents preying on…
-
Film Review: Snowden
★★☆☆☆ It’s hardly a surprise that Oliver Stone would want to make Snowden. He’s always been a filmmaker with a political conscience and his recent comments on Pokémon Go would suggest a healthy distrust of the surveillance state. It’s a shame then that his political thriller about Edward Snowden, based on The Snowden Files by…
-
Film Review: The Birth of a Nation
★★★☆☆ Sometimes there are films that have such a whirlwind of media attention and extraneous commentary that it’s nigh on impossible to discuss them in isolation. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation was already hauling around significant baggage by re-purposing the title of D.W.Griffith’s 1915 film – which was technically revolutionary and morally repugnant…