Joseph Walsh
-
Film Review: ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’
★★★★☆ A key part of the BFI’s Ealing: Light and Dark season and rereleased this Friday, Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a much-underrated kitchen sink crime drama set over one dreary Sunday, telling a tale of working-class life set within London’s East End. Based on the novel by Arthur La Bernby,…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Good Vibrations’ review
★★★☆☆ Detailing the life of Belfast’s Godfather of Punk, Terri Hooley (played with a compelling level of emotion by Richard Dormer), Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations (2012) is the story of a man with a very special dream. Hooley, amidst the chaos and confusion of the Northern Irish Troubles, decides that the…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Song for Marion’ review
★★☆☆☆ British director Paul Andrew Williams offers up OAP drama Song for Marion (2012) at this year’s 56th London Film Festival, starring the considerable talents of Vanessa Redgrave, Terrance Stamp, Christopher Eccleston and Gemma Arterton. Marion (Redgrave) and her husband Arthur (Stamp) live in their small suburban bungalow, coping with the fallout of Marion’s recent…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Seven Psychopaths’ review
★★★☆☆ Following on from the award-winning, critically-acclaimed success story that was In Bruges (2008), Irish writer and director Martin McDonagh is back in business with impressively-cast, tongue-in-cheek existentialist revenge thriller Seven Psychopaths (2012), starring Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken. Screenwriter and part-time alcoholic Marty (Farrell) is struggling to get his screenplay written, and…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘A Liar’s Autobiography 3D’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Monty Python fans may rejoice at news of Bill Jones (son of Python’s Terry Jones) joining forces with fellow directors Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett for their take on the late Graham Chapman’s 1980s liberal spin on his own life, A Liar’s Autobiography (2012). This new mockumentary of the same name follows in a…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘West of Memphis’ review
★★★☆☆ In 1994, three US teens were convicted of the murder of three children in the state of Memphis, with the authorities believing the deaths to be related to a series of satanic rituals. Over a decade later, new forensic evidence was presented that suggested that the men were wrongly convicted. This lengthy battle for…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘The Loves of Pharaoh’ review
★★★☆☆ When Howard Carter discovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb back in 1922, a sensation swept the entire European continent, resulting in a great deal of public fascination towards all things Ancient Egyptian. It would be tempting to compare this discovery to the restoration of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Loves of Pharaoh (thought lost for many years), but…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘I, Anna’ review
★★☆☆☆ I, Anna (2012) director Barnaby Southcombe, son of actress Charlotte Rampling (who takes the lead role as a femme fatale in this, his feature debut), attempts to adapt Elsa Lewin’s novel of the same name in what is a disappointing thriller set in London’s Barbican. After a man is brutally murdered in his apartment,…
-
Film Review: ‘Frankenweenie’
★★★★☆ In recent years, Tim Burton’s cinematic output has been more than a little disappointing. Revisiting his own source material with 2012 stop-motion animation Frankenweenie 3D (based on a 1984 short he made whilst working for Disney), he manages a partial return to form with a feature that possesses the magic we know and love…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Hyde Park on Hudson’ review
★★☆☆☆ Desperately clinging to the fading memory of last year’s Academy Award-sweeping The King’s Speech (2010), Roger Michel’s Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) tells the story of an important weekend in the summer of 1939, when president Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray) played host to King George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman),…