Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: Three Wishes for Cinderella
★★★★☆ For all of the great opportunities that film festivals give to explore the cinema of other cultures, it’s always worth remembering that they’re curated with international audiences in mind – and often for those with a love of auteur-driven arthouse fare. In many cases, the films that travel well aren’t those that achieve domestic…
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DVD Review: Lo and Behold
★★★☆☆ “I think anyone who claims they know what’s going to happen to the internet is not worth listening to.” This summation of the way we understand and can predict the interconnectivity of the future seems an apposite way to begin a discussion of Werner Herzog’s expansive, nebulous investigation in Lo and Behold, Reveries of…
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Film Review: Moana
★★★★☆ In 2013, Disney’s phenomenally successful Frozen marked a turning point for the House of Mouse in the handling of their trademark princess characters. The film’s lauded ‘true love’ reveal was a re-defining moment and their newest sure-fire hit, Moana, takes another confident step in the right direction, this time while equally navigating the familiar…
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DVD Review: Tickled
★★★☆☆ It’s unlikely you’re going to come across too many documentaries this year with a yarn to spin as tangled and twisted as Tickled. Following the investigations of New Zealand pop culture journalist David Farrier, it is essentially an expose of a particular media company who specialise in online videos of Competitive Endurance Tickling (CET).…
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DVD Review: Jason Bourne
★★★☆☆ When The Bourne Ultimatum was released in 2007, star Matt Damon felt that the story of his amnesiac-assassin protagonist had been told. “The story of this guy’s search for his identity is over” he said, before stating that only a reconfiguration of the character at some future point could persuade him to return. So…
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Film Review: I, Olga Hepnarová
★★★★☆ Early on in I, Olga Hepnarová the eponymous mass-murderer (played with rangy inscrutability by Machalina Olszanska) refers to a passage from Graeme Greene’s The Quiet American. It’s the famous underlying message of the novel which claims that it’s impossible to truly know someone else and that we should “just accept that no human will…
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Film Review: Dog Eat Dog
★★☆☆☆ There is an alternate universe in which Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog – a brazenly disreputable and vicious crime caper – is a high watermark of postmodern American genre cinema. The veteran director has confessed that the film is a throwaway affair, a reunion with Nicholas Cage in reaction to their 2014 psychological thriller,…
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Film Review: National Bird
★★★☆☆ Drone warfare is widely condemned on the basis of its relative safety and detachment from the horrors of combat. If you’re going to kill someone, you should at least have the steel to look them in the eye while you do it. This maxim is turned on its head a little by Sonia Kennebeck’s…
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Film Review: American Pastoral
★★☆☆☆ Ewan McGregor’s decision to begin his directorial career with an adaptation of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral was nothing if not ambitious. Roth’s novel is the kind of densely-layered opus about the fictions of the American Dream that is regularly described as unfilmable and, regrettably, McGregor’s effort seems to only have added fuel…
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DVD Review: X-Men: Apocalypse
★★☆☆☆ Bryan Singer effectively kick-started the modern comic book movie era in 2000. Sure, Batman was being decimated by Joel Schumacher in the late 1990s and Wesley Snipes made his debut as Blade in 1998, but it was Singer’s X-Men that really launched the cinematic landscape that we know today. If X-Men was the prototype…
