Joseph Walsh

★★★☆☆ French New Wave director Claude Chabrol’s latter career is rarely admired and often seen as his weaker period, yet with Rien Ne Va Plus (The Swindle, 1997) all the tell-tell signs of what made the late director great, are present. As an auteur he was always indebted to Hitchcock (his first feature, 1957’s Le…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ Starring British actress Sheridan Smith and following its World Premiere at this year’s Film4 FrightFest, James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson make their directorial debuts this week with low budget horror Tower Block (2012). Chief protagonist Becky (Smith) lives in a decaying London council block, which is doomed to be demolished in the very near…

Continue

★☆☆☆☆ Ol Parker follows up 2005’s Imagine Me & You with Now Is Good (2012), the tale of a young girl, Tessa (Dakota Fanning), who is dying of terminal leukaemia. With her treatment failing, Tessa decides to create a bucket-list, the top priority being to lose her virginity to the man of her dreams. Yet…

Continue

★★★☆☆ Adapting the astounding life of 1960s/70s French pop sensation Claude François (aka ‘Cloclo’) for the big screen was never going to be an easy task for any director, regardless of past experience in the area. Yet that was just the challenge taken up by filmmaker Florent Emillio Siri who stepped up to the plate…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ Woody Allen continues his European odyssey with To Rome with Love (2012), intertwining multiple stories which attempt to paint a portrait of life in the Eternal City. The various plots stretch across the social scale, including an Italian worker who finds himself an overnight celebrity (Roberto Benigni), a young pair of Italian newly-weds who…

Continue

★★★☆☆ With the UK release of Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s ParaNorman 3D (2012), comparisons with Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012) seem almost unavoidable. Both claymation features draw upon established horror classics (albeit from different cinematic eras), and yet remain very different films in their own right. Whereas Burton pays tribute to 1930s horror, ParaNorman salutes…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ The opening scene of The Football Factory (2004) director Nick Love’s The Sweeney (2012) features a frenetically-paced – and unarguably entertaining – bank heist that packs a series of high-octane punches, all vaguely reminiscent of Antonia Bird’s Face (1997). However, what initially promises to be a thrilling tale of gangsters and morally-dubious coppers on…

Continue

★★★★☆ Cinephiles’ commitment to austere, ‘slow cinema’ faces a new challenge with the release on DVD of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), told with the typically repetitive, yet sumptuous quality that audiences have come to expect from the Hungarian director. The film opens with the account of a small moment in the life of…

Continue

★★★★☆ Aardman is back doing what it does best with the tremendously fun and silly The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012), a stop-motion claymation adventure set on the high seas, out now on DVD and Blu-ray. Star of the film – the vain, yet lovable Pirate Captain (suitably voiced by Hugh Grant at…

Continue

★★★☆☆ Matthias Hoene’s FrightFest opener Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) is an enjoyable, bare-faced zomventure that delivers exactly what the title promises – a fun-filled, B-movie romp with plenty of thrills, spills and jellied eels. When construction workers unwittingly unleash a horde of zombies from a tomb that has been sealed since the reign of King…

Continue