Ben Nicholson
-
DocHouse Presents: A River Changes Course review
★★★☆☆ “If you marry a city man you will be short of money,” claims a young Cambodian boy in Kalyanee Mam’s glacial documentary A River Changes Course (2013). He goes on to reveal that if you were to choose him, you will have dollars to spend on such things as a Lexus or a villa.…
-
Film Review: ‘Epic 3D’
★★☆☆☆ Little do the oversized world of galumphing humans realise that living in our forests are legions of tiny ‘Leafmen’, in armour, protecting the natural world from the evils of decay. Under the benevolent rule of a magical queen, this ancient race maintains balance by keeping in check their marauding antagonists, the ‘Boggans’. At least…
-
Blu-ray Review: ‘The Murderer Lives at 21’
★★★☆☆ At initial glance Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21 (L’Assassin habite au 21, 1942) would appear to be mere comic folly from a director highly respected for serious thrillers. Arriving on Blu-ray in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series, its television-style whodunnit set up, cast of oddball suspects and humorous tone all point towards…
-
DVD Review: ‘The Films of Sadao Yamanaka’
★★★★☆ Having brought the relatively unknown (to Western audiences) Bakumatsu Taiyô-den (The Sun Legend in the Last Days of the Shogunate, 1957) to Blu-ray last month, the Masters of Cinema series now provide another prime example of classic Japanese cinema unseen in the UK. In September 1938, at the tender age of 28, acclaimed director…
-
DVD Review: ‘West of Memphis’
★★★☆☆ Amy Berg’s sobering polemic West of Memphis (2012) shines a light on the failings of the American criminal justice system through the campaign to free a trio of wrongly convicted men after almost twenty years in prison. Having premièred at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, West of Memphis was released to wide acclaim and…
-
DocHouse Presents: When the Boys Return review
★★★☆☆ Life in occupied Palestine is always going provide an emotive base for a documentary, and this is certainly the case in Tone Andersen’s When the Boys Return (2012). Taking as its focus a group of teenagers that are repeatedly imprisoned by Israeli forces for crimes such as ‘throwing stones’, the doc aims to explore the…
-
Cannes 2013: ‘Llewyn Davis’ preview
There’s not an awful lot that gets the tongues of indie film fans a-wagging more than the approach of a new Coen brothers movie. After a string of four films in as many years, they’ve had a little break their last directorial effort True Grit (2010), but they’re back this year with Inside Llewyn Davis…
-
Film Review: ‘Come Out and Play’
★★☆☆☆ The Belarus-born director of new horror Come Out and Play (2012) is something of an eccentric figure. After a near-death experience whilst shooting a documentary on Huichol shamanism in Mexico, he forged himself a new identity; Makinov (no first name required). He now only appears clad in a red hood, meaning that both the…
-
Film Review: ‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’
★★★★★ Two simply-drawn stick men approach each other on a field of white and share an awkward encounter as they pass. One of them, Bill, inexplicably stumbles through simple sentences and conflates words before they depart, never to see one another again. This was one of the character’s initial appearances in animator Don Hertzfeldt’s comic…
-
DocHouse Presents: In the Shadow of a Man review
★★★★☆ Nobody could have possibly imagined the legacy that Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of self-immolation in late 2010 would have. His tragic death inspired the Tunisian revolution, and as such proved a catalyst for the widespread ‘Arab Spring’, which moved next to Egypt. These passionate uprisings in the name of human rights and governmental reform…