Ben Nicholson
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Made in Prague 2016: Our picks from the programme
Despite being a nation with an illustrious cinema heritage, Czech Republic is not a country that is especially well served by modern distributors in the UK. Their rich history is continually mined for brilliant home entertainment releases by the likes of Second Run and Arrow – bringing the venerated likes of Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova,…
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Film Review: Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
★★★☆☆ In the two and a half decades since his first feature film Slackers debuted at New Directors/New Films in New York, Richard Linklater has built an unlikely career out of humility and driven artistic ambition. Choosing to remain in Austin, Texas rather than racing blindly for the big lights of Tinseltown he’s cultivated an…
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DVD Review: Kate Plays Christine
★★★★☆ “Nobody sees anyone as she is, let alone an actress playing a troubled young woman 40 years after her death. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves.” This is a flagrant bastardisation of a quote from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but it perfectly encapsulates the needling…
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Film Review: Doctor Strange
★★★★☆ The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an expansive and nebulous place, the riches of which the movies have only really begun to discover. After the scientific and Earth-bound exploits of the Avengers, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy voyaged to the furthest reaches of space through the eyes of a boy taken from Earth; in their…
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Film Review: Sonita
★★★☆☆ There are two concurrent and intertwining stories playing out in Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s irresistible, crowd-pleasing documentary Sonita. The main event is the tale of the eponymous teenager, an Afghan immigrant in Tehran with dreams of being the next Rihanna. She’s cocky, charismatic, and does a great line in punchy, socially-motivated hip-hop. She’s the perfect…
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Film Review: Mascots
★★★☆☆ Watching Christopher Guest’s Mascots is a lot like meeting up with old friends you’ve not seen in years. It’s comfortable, the gang’s all there and the laughs come thick and fast, but you also can’t shake the nagging feeling that your relationships haven’t evolved with the people you’ve become. This is the fifth instalment…
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#LFF 2016: A United Kingdom review
★★★☆☆ Sweeping period melodrama and socially conscious political storytelling are intertwined to satisfying effect in A United Kingdom, the new film from Belle director Amma Asante. Once again turning her hand to a real life tale about an interracial romance, she builds the story of Prince Seretse Khama of Bechuanaland (modern day Botswana) and London…
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DVD Review: Electra, My Love
★★★★☆ Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó described his trademark filmmaking style as ‘calligraphic’, asserting that he wrote the film with his camera as a pen. His style was one of reel-length takes that ebb and flow; meticulous choreography that incorporated close-ups and long-shots into single, unbroken sequences often dominated by balletic movement and song as much…
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DVD Review: Love & Friendship
★★★★☆ It’s hardly surprising that the wit of Jane Austen’s writing is often overlooked when it’s transposed onto the screen. It’s not so much that adaptations actively avoid it as much as neglect to emphasise the regular disharmony between what characters are saying and what they really think in favour of the BBC period detail…
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Film Review: The Magnificent Seven
★★☆☆☆ There are a few moments at the beginning of Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven when it seems to make a case for its own existence. The trailers may have done their darnedest to make it look like a frontier Suicide Squad (did nobody tell them how that worked out?) but at first glance it…