Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: ‘Do Elephants Pray?’
★★★☆☆ Based on an original screenplay written by its star performer Jonnie Hurn, Do Elephants Pray? (2010) is something of a low-key British indie oddity from director Paul Hills. Any film in which its central character literally hugs trees could well extricate groans from a modern audience. Fortunately, this part rom-com, part treatise on embracing…
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DVD Review: ‘The Confrontation’
★★★★☆ Hungarian auteur, Miklós Jancsó, made a name for himself in the mid 1960s with a loose trilogy of monochrome meditations on the corrupting nature of power. Even in these early pictures, his controlled visuals were noteworthy but in Second Run-released The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1969), the tone was set for the rest of his…
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DVD Review: ‘The Queen of Versailles’
★★★★☆ Most people would probably manage to just about survive the ignominy of living in a 26,000 square foot home with seventeen (count ’em) bathrooms. The fact that the infamous Siegel family were “busting out of the seams” in theirs was part of the reason that photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield will have decided…
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DVD Review: ‘V/H/S’
★★☆☆☆ The anthology movie has been a staple of the horror genre for several decades, with its origins creeping back even further to the days of expressionist Germany. Embracing that very same tradition, whilst simultaneously looking to rejuvenate it for the 21st century and tip a nostalgic hat to grimy 1980s ‘video nasty’ cinema, is…
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DocHouse Presents: A Russian Fairytale review
★★★★☆ The collapse of the Soviet Union hit certain Russian cities particularly hard. Having been a producer of Soviet weaponry, the city of Perm saw production halve, life expectancy drop and an estimated 49% of the population descend into a life of poverty and perpetual uncertainty. This led to many children fleeing abusive homes to…
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Film Review: ‘The King of Pigs’
★★☆☆☆ The inherent darkness and cruelty of youth is not an alien concept to Asian filmmakers. The Japanese have provided two excellent examinations of the escalating brutality of out-of-control school children with the gore-soaked cult hit Battle Royale (2000) and 2010’s Confession. South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2004) also told of the repercussions of childhood…
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Film Review: ‘Hollow’
★★☆☆☆ The Blair Witch Project (1999) has an awful lot to answer for. Despite numerous efforts, seldom does a feature manage to replicate its successful use of found footage, or attempt to do something interesting within the resulting sub-genre. The majority of entries have simply not stacked up, yet it’s still a thriving form within…
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DVD Review: ‘Above the Street, Below the Water’
★★★☆☆ Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years (or don’t own a television), you’ll more than likely be aware of the explosion of Scandinavian drama on British screens in recent times. The enormous success of crime serials such as The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen has led to higher demand…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Django’
★★★★☆ There is only on name beginning with the letters D and J on the lips of film fans at the moment, and it is that of taciturn gunslinger Django (“The ‘D’ is silent”). Controversy may surround Tarantino’s latest but so do award nominations; the film community is rife with discussion and debate. As such,…
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DVD Review: ‘Django, Prepare a Coffin’
★★★☆☆ Those who simply can’t wait for Hollywood renegade (and ‘butt shut-downer’) Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) to hit cinemas later this week – or baulk at the bladder-straining runtime – need fear not. They can now get their fix of the iconic, if somewhat changeable gunslinger with the first DVD release of Ferdinando Baldi’s…