Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: ‘The Reverend’
★★☆☆☆ Rutger Hauer plays Satan, Doug Bradley is a priest, Shane Ritchie camps it up as a vile pimp and Tamer Hassan aims for gentrified land owner. That sentence alone should make Neil Jones’ low-budget British horror worth watching, but The Reverend (2011) is unfortunately hamstrung by a muddled screenplay, unconvincing central performance and a…
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DVD Review: ‘Mirror Mirror’
★★☆☆☆ Several years ago, Indian filmmaker Tarsem Singh made an ambitious, self-funded and visually glorious pseudo-fairy tale called The Fall (2006); unfortunately, the story didn’t live up to the wonder of the photography on-screen. With his family-orientated, revisionist take on the classic fairy tale of Snow White, he has clearly improved his storytelling ability. However,…
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Toronto Film Festival 2012: Five minute trailer for ‘Cloud Atlas’
When it was first announced that someone was hoping to adapt David Mitchell’s award-winning, genre-hopping, millennia-spanning concertina of a novel for the big screen, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the people attempting such a feat were crazy. Well, crazy or not, the first images and a huge 5 minute trailer (embedded at…
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DVD Review: ‘Zombie 108’
★☆☆☆☆ “What was with that naked zombie chick, dude?” Indeed, Running Foreigner #1, indeed. Billed as the very first Taiwanese zombie movie in history, Joe Chien’s apocalyptic-torture-porn-zombie flick Zombie 108 (2012) is as ramshackle as its group of survivors that race down the narrow alleyways of Taipei and has about as much direction and purpose…
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DVD Review: ‘Wild Bill’
★★★★☆ The promotional material for Wild Bill (2012) bore all the hallmarks of a mockney crime caper, down to it being the directorial debut of actor Dexter Fletcher who appeared in Guy Ritchie’s trend-setting Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Fletcher’s film however is a very different kettle of fish; balancing the gritty East-London…
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Film Review: ‘I Am Bruce Lee’
★★★☆☆ “My obsession is to make, pardon the expression, the fuckingest action movie ever.” With the recent release of Gareth Evans action film The Raid (2011), which many have described in similar terms to those above, it seems only appropriate that the world takes a look back at the man who influenced all martial arts…
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Film Review: ‘Revenge of the Electric Car’
★★★☆☆ Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? chronicled the rise and fall of the eponymous vehicle using a rather affected ‘whodunnit’ framework. Featuring an actual funeral for General Motors’ famous EV-1, the film was a jeremiad rammed with facts, stats, very important information and impotent rage but failed to ever be truly…
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Christopher Nolan Season: ‘The Prestige’
★★★★☆ Adapting Christopher Priest’s novel concerning duelling magicians in Victorian London into 2006’s The Prestige not only allowed Chris Nolan to make his first British-set film since The Following (1998) but gave he and his brother Jonathan the chance to return to the kind of non-linear storytelling that made Memento (2000) so special.Sat in a…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The 25th Reich’
★☆☆☆☆ You wait years for a schlocky, tongue-in-cheek, sci-fiction B-movie about Nazis and then two come along at once. Landing on DVD only weeks after Timo Vuorensola’s Finnish pastiche Iron Sky (2012), comes Stephen Amis’ The 25th Reich (2012). Unlike Iron Sky however, this film doesn’t boast a killer one (tag)line premise, but it’s not…
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DVD Review: ‘The Source’
★★☆☆☆ A nondescript North African mountain village, serves us the setting for French director Radu Mihaileanu’s re-imagining of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as a comedy drama about a group of Muslim women rebelling against their patriarchal social system in The Source (La source des femmes, 2011). Aristophanes’ comedy saw the women of ancient Greece uniting to end…