Ben Nicholson
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Blu-ray Review: ‘From Beyond’
★★★★☆ After the success of their first H. P. Lovecraft adaptation, the team behind 1985 cult classic Re-Animator turned their attention to another of the writer’s terrifying tales. This time, the source was to be a (very) short story about a obsessive scientist that would become a science fiction horror film of the same name,…
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DVD Review: ‘McCullin’
★★★★☆ Don McCullin entered the public consciousness with his memorable photo of a North London gang, standing defiantly amidst a dilapidated building. That was his very first published photograph, displayed by The Observer in 1958, and is where the aptly-titled documentary, McCullin (2012), jumps off. Directed by David and Jacqui Morris, this is no mere…
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Film Review: ‘Breath of the Gods’
★★★☆☆ Jan Schmidt-Garre has found the creative process as a constant draw and his production company has presented music and the arts on film since its formation. The director’s output – whether factual or narrative – has been preoccupied by concert, opera, theatre, and dance. After his wife began to practice it, Schmidt found himself…
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Interview: William Eubank, director of ‘Love’
Taking on a low-budget existential sci-fi epic might seem like a big task for a young, up-and-coming director, but that is exactly what US cinematographer (and now filmmaker) William Eubank did with his feature debut, Love (2011). The film sees an astronaut cut off from the world aboard the International Space Station, left with nothing…
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DVD Review: ‘A Liar’s Autobiography’
★★☆☆☆ When Graham Chapman joined the choir invisible in 1989, it put an end to rumours of a full Monty Python reunion once and for all. The majority of the gang have been brought back together though, in voice at least, for an animated chronicle of the life of the inimitable comedian. In 1980 Chapman…
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Berlin 2013: ‘TPB AFK’ review
★★★☆☆ Founded in 2003 by “a couple of guys in a [internet] chatroom,” peer-to-peer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was responsible for co-ordinating half of the world’s bit-torrent traffic by 2009. With an estimated 22-25 million users downloading from the site at any one time, TPB is clearly a principal player. It’s claimed that major…
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Berlin 2013: ‘The Meteor’ review
★★★★☆ French-Canadian director François Delisle’s fourth film, The Meteor (Le météore, 2013), is an avant-garde exploration of isolation that quite rightly appears in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section. Eschewing conventional narrative techniques, the film includes not a single line of dialogue or actual human interaction and instead attempts to delve deep into its characters…
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Film Review: ‘For Ellen’
★★★☆☆ Bonds between children and their parents have been significantly prominent in the blossoming career of South Korean director So Yong Kim. Her first two films both contained young female characters with absentee fathers and her latest offering is no different. With For Ellen (2012), however, the setting is the United States and it is…
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DVD Review: ‘The House I Live In’
★★★★☆ The United States of America now officially holds 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. This is just one of the many staggering statistics highlighted in Eugene Jarecki’s urgent and enthralling documentary, The House I Live In (2012), which now arrives on DVD in the UK courtesy of doc specialists Dogwoof.…
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Film Review: ‘The Fall of the Essex Boys’
★★☆☆☆ “If you think you know this story…” the audience is told at the outset of the latest film to cover the 1995 Rettendon killings, “…think again.” The problem with this assertion is that Paul Tanter’s film, The Fall of the Essex Boys (2012), is the fourth film to tackle the subject matter in little…