Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: ‘Twenty8k’
★★☆☆☆ The London 2012 Paralympics end this weekend, bringing to a close a summer of British athletics that has seen unrivalled joy that has infected the populace as well as those taking part. As such, a film centring on corrupt politicians in the lead up to this year’s games may not quite seem to fit…
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Interview: Alice Rohrwacher, director of ‘Corpo Celeste’
Corpo Celeste (2011) is the assured debut feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. Centring around a community in urban Italy through the eyes of the adolescent Marta the naturalistic and allegorical film examines this microcosm from an outsiders view, and in particular the role of the church in modern Italian society. With the film out…
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Toronto Film Festival 2012: New ‘Cloud Atlas’ trailer released ahead of TIFF
Modern life is forever a rush and as such, those of you pressed for time may not have had the chance to sit and enjoy the full five minutes and forty-two seconds of the first extended trailer for Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s time-trotting literary adaptation, Cloud Atlas (2012). Well fear not, as…
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Film Review: ‘St George’s Day’
★★☆☆☆ Frank Harper is most well known for appearing in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and The Football Factory (2004), and it’s to cockney gangsters and football hooligans that he turns in his directorial debut, St George’s Day (2012). The result is a fairly unremarkable crime caper that boasts production value and an…
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Film Review: ‘Love’
★★★☆☆ There is always likely to be an air of suspicion permeating a low budget science fiction epic that is produced and scored by an alternative rock band, and released as a tie-in with a double album (calls of “cash-in” are, unfortunately, to be expected). The band in question are Angels and Airwaves, led by…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Dead Sushi’ review
★★☆☆☆ To misquote the crows from Disney’s 1941 classic Dumbo; “I’ve seen a horse fly, I’ve seen a dragon fly, I’ve seen a house fly, but I ain’t never seen sushi fly.” Many of the good folks who attended this year’s Film4 FrightFest, however, will have no need of such a statement if they managed…
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Venice 2012: Brian De Palma’s ‘Passion’ preview
Chosen as part of the official selection for the 2012 Venice Film Festival where it will premiere, the first trailer for erotic thriller Passion (2012) is now online. Directed by Brian De Palma, the film is likely to draw comparisons to such past efforts as Basic Instinct (1992) and the director’s own Dressed to Kill…
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DVD Review: ‘The Island President’
★★★★☆ “A cross between paradise and paradise” is how President Mohamed Nasheed describes his country which sits precariously at the mercy of the Indian ocean. Those who would prefer to visit the Maldives and enjoy its white beaches whilst remaining oblivious to its violent political past and its threat of extinction might do best to…
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Special Feature: Crowd-sourced film ’50 Kisses’ now has scripts
In late October, Regent’s College London will once again play host to the 2012 London Screenwriters’ Festival 2012. The biggest professional screenwriting event in the world will see over 100 speakers present at a series of script labs, speed pitching seminars and networking opportunities. In conjunction with the event, a competition was launched to make…
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DVD Review: ‘Headhunters’
★★★★☆ With the recent invasion of Scandinavian crime fiction on British shores bringing with it slow-burning procedurals and flawed police officers, you might expect similar from the latest Norwegian entry into the fast growing genre. Instead, Headhunters (2011) director Morten Tyldum has delivered a high octane, violent heist thriller that has earned each and every…