Christopher Machell

★★★★☆ While serving a life sentence and in indefinite solitary confinement, convicted murderer Robert Stroud began raising birds. In so doing, he educated himself and discovered cures for several avian diseases, eventually publishing his work. Based loosely on his life, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film is a stately and moving depiction of the man’s capacity for…

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★★★☆☆ It’s the year of our Lord 1501 and in Western Europe the venal and the powerful wage war. In this brutal society, to the victors go the spoils, but betrayal and vengeance are never far away.  Paul Verhoeven’s first English language film Flesh + Blood is bloody, cynical and unrefined, but indicative of his later…

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★★★☆☆ Costing a pricey-for-the-time $2 million, John Murray Anderson’s 1930 film was a Technicolor extravaganza but an almighty flop on release. Like a live-action, jazz precursor to Disney’s Fantasia, King of Jazz forgoes narrative in favour of big-screen spectacle and musical numbers. Setting out its stall in the opening minutes, we are treated to an…

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★★★★★ Ostensibly a documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally slippery biographer, Clifford Irving, Orson Welles’ last completed film is more an elusive meditation on the nature of artifice, forgery and reality. F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary. Opening with Welles himself playing a…

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★★★★★ IMF Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and long-time associates Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are on the trail of the Syndicate, a rogue anarchist network of former spies. When their op goes awry, Ethan and his team must race to avert catastrophe. So far, so Mission: Impossible. Yet in this sixth instalment, writer-director…

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★★★☆☆ Inspired by the famous frozen Ötzal mummy discovered in 1991, Felix Randau’s third feature tells the story of the eponymous Iceman’s final days. Living in a small settlement among the Neolithic Ötzal Alps, tribal leader Kelab (Jürgen Vogel) returns home from hunting to find his family killed, dwellings burned to the ground, and a…

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★★★★☆ In 1918, a German regiment occupies a small French town, to which they hope to lure the advancing British army before blowing the place up with hidden explosives. Getting wind of the plan, Colonel Alexander MacBibenbrook (Adolfo Celi) sends Scottish soldier Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates) to defuse the bomb in this farcical yet poignant…

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★★★★★ In 1928 Berlin, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is released from prison after serving four years for the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Ida (Barbara Valentin). Based on Alfred Döblin’s celebrated 1929 novel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Weimar-set odyssey is some 15 hours long. Exhausting and exhaustive, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an epic tale of brutality, betrayal and…

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★★☆☆☆ Laura (Evan Rachel Wood) is working for her father’s cleaning company when she meets 16-year-old Eva (Julie Sarah Stone) at one of her jobs. Eva is frustrated with her controlling mother, and so spotting a vulnerability, Laura begins grooming the teenager. Evan Rachel Wood is no stranger to playing vulnerable, damaged young women, from…

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★★★★☆ After his best friend Esteban is devoured my a mysterious monster of the deep, the legendary undersea documentarian Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) vows to find and destroy the creature to avenge his friend. Designating the animal the ‘jaguar shark’, Zissou and his team set out in search of his elusive nemesis. Matters are complicated…

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