Ben Nicholson

★★★☆☆ Since its completion a couple of years ago, Norwegian comedy-drama Happy, Happy (Sykt Iykkelig, 2010) has gone on to scoop the Grand Jury Prize for world cinema at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and be its country’s official selection for the 84th Academy Awards. Receiving acclaim wherever it travels, Anne Sewitsky’s debut feature is…

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★★★☆☆ Names like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov understandably dominate the column inches when it comes to the pioneering Soviet filmmakers of the early 20th century. This means that it can be easy for other revered cinematic artists of the time, such as Boris Barnet, to be overlooked. To help make sure that…

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★★★☆☆ Currently gracing the silver screen with his turn as the morally dubious Martial in Jacques Audiard’s powerful melodrama Rust and Bone (2012), Bouli Lanners’ latest directorial outing arrives on the small screen via its DVD release. The Giants (Les Géants, 2011) is a meandering tale of one long summer in the adolescent life of…

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★★★★☆ The surprise winner of last year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay’s real-life underdog tale Undefeated (2011) proves as worthy of the accolades as the team upon which it focuses. Combining emphasis on the people instrumental in this American football team’s successes with high drama in the tightest of…

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★★☆☆☆ Originally written in the late 1990s, Dennis Gansel’s vampire film We Are the Night (2010) – starring German arthouse star Nina Hoss – spent almost a decade in development hell before the success of the Twilight franchise reopened the doors for it. With bloodsucking very much back in vogue, especially at this time of…

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★★★★☆ American indie director Lynn Shelton’s long-awaited follow-up to the excellent Humpday (2009) sees her once again calling upon the improvisational acting style of mumblecore veteran Mark Duplass in one of the lead roles. Although Your Sister’s Sister (2011) is slightly more generic than the director’s previous output, the parade of incredibly likeable characters and…

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★★★★☆ “If you can get the King to visit your bed chamber on the first evening, you’ll be perceived as a great success.” This is the advice handed down to Caroline Mathilde (Alicia Vikander) by her mother before she embarks on her journey from England to marry the then Danish King, Christian the VII (Mikkel…

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★★★☆☆ “When a star with a small mass quietly loses energy, it becomes a white dwarf. It sheds its outer layers to form a nebula; a pale remnant of what it once was.” This may shed some cosmic light onto one aspect of what Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong is getting at with her confounding feature…

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★★☆☆☆ Eduardo Sanchez was one half of the directorial team that unleashed the now prevalent found footage motif onto horror movies in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project. His latest offering to the genre, Lovely Molly (2011) – which hit cinemas earlier this year and is released this week on DVD – is a disconcerting…

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★★★☆☆ The directorial debut of Jonathan Cenzual Burley, El Alma de las Moscas (The Soul of Flies, 2010) is a charming and surreal Spanish indie comedy. Two brothers meet for the first time in front of an abandoned railway station at which they are waiting for a train. The death of their wandering father has…

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