Features
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Film4 Summer Screen 2012: New season begins this week
Open air cinema season Film4 Summer Screen returns to London’s Somerset House this August (16-27), with regular sponsors American Express® once again showing their support for the UK film industry. Featuring more UK premieres than ever before, with Walter Salles’ On the Road, US comedy The Watch (win tickets here!) and John Hillcoat’s Lawless all…
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Special Feature: Scala Beyond lineup announced
Last year, the London-wide Scala Forever film season proved a huge success with the capital’s film fanatical populace and this year stretches its reach with follow-up fest Scala Beyond. This brand new six-week season (taking place from 18 August-29 September) will celebrate all forms of cinema nationwide, from Newcastle to Brighton, in venues as varied…
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Special Feature: Tarun Thind presents short film ‘English’
Approximately a year ago today, a swarm of antipathy left London in a choke-hold as a series of riots engulfed the capital. What began as a peaceful protest against police brutality mutated into a beast more brutal than anyone could have envisaged. Described as ‘copycat violence’ by the media, thousands upon thousands took to the…
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Special Feature: ‘Vertigo’ tops Sight & Sound poll
This week, the BFI’s newly re-launched Sight & Sound magazine crowned Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the new king of its ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll, ending the 50-year reign of Orson Welles’ magnificent Citizen Kane. 846 film critics, academics, distributors, writers and programmers were invited to put forward their own personal favourites, a notable…
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Special Feature: Future Artists reinvents Salford’s Black Lion
With cinemas across the world struggling to keep up numbers and profits (save the popcorn) it’s a genuinely odd thing to hear of a new cinema that’s surviving – and generating its own film lovers’ club around it. And an old, northern Victorian family pub, furnished with mahogany and brass, is definitely the last place…
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Christopher Nolan Season: ‘Inception’
★★★★☆ When we’re dreaming, time moves differently. We don’t notice while we’re sleeping, but it does; a second of real time can feel like minutes, or even hours, in dream-time. It’s a concept that’s taken to its thrilling logical conclusion in Inception (2010), as writer/director Christopher Nolan spins out a tale of action, love, loss and…
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Christopher Nolan Season: ‘The Dark Knight’
★★★★★ With box office behemoth The Dark Knight (2008), Christopher Nolan created a game-changing comic book film adaptation that combined spectacular, hyper-realistic action with intelligent themes and a real sense of finesse. It also featured one of the performances of the decade, as the late Heath Ledger provides his own unique spin on the maniacal…
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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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Christopher Nolan Season: ‘Batman Begins’
★★★☆☆ When it was announced that Christopher Nolan would reboot the Batman franchise with Batman Begins back in 2005, many were fearful. This trepidation was not unwarranted after the gaudy mess that was Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997), yet Nolan abandoned the camp style of previous endeavours, opting instead for a darker story drawing…
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Christopher Nolan Season: ‘Insomnia’
★★★★☆ 2002’s Insomnia, Christopher Nolan’s follow up to his breakout hit Memento (2000), was at first glance a far less ambitious genre piece. Whereas Memento was noted for its radical narrative innovation with a largely unknown cast, Insomnia was a remake of a Norwegian film from 1997 and starred Hollywood legend Al Pacino. Pacino plays Will…