Joseph Walsh
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Film Review: ‘Total Recall’ (2012)
★★☆☆☆ Back in 1990, ‘Austrian oak’ Arnold Schwarzenegger hit our screens as the mind-muddled Douglas Quaid in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel We Can Remember it for you Wholesale. Now, Hollywood hack Len Wiseman has undertaken the challenge of remaking the original cult sci-fi classic, with a…
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Film Review: ‘Berberian Sound Studio’
★★★★★ British director Peter Strickland follows up his acclaimed debut feature Katalin Varga (2009) with the eerie and aurally-disturbing Berberian Sound Studio (2012), a tale that blurs the lines of reality, set within a sleazy Italian post-production studio in the 1970s. Toby Jones plays Dorking-born protagonist Gilderoy, an English sound mixer who unwittingly departs from…
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DVD Review: ‘Dinotasia’
★★☆☆☆ A heady combination of Werner Herzog and dinosaurs should be enough to draw people to David Krentz and Erik Nelson’s pseudo-documentary Dinotasia (2012), a dramatic retelling of a the age of the ‘terrible lizards’, leading up to the destruction of these prehistoric titans by a giant meteor crashing into the Earth. Sadly, this rambling…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Sinister’ review
★★★☆☆ As mainstream US horrors go, Scott Derrickson’s latest twist on the found footage formula, Sinister (2012), provides an enjoyable ride of bumps-in-the-night thrills and spills. The traditionally solid Ethan Hawke stars as a true-crime writer (a clear link to his turn earlier this year in French psychological drama The Woman in the Fifth), who…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘Chained’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Surveillance (2008) director Jennifer Lynch returns to Film4 FrightFest screens this weekend with serial killer horror Chained (2012), which stars old-hand Vincent D’Onofrio and Eamon Farren. The film revolves around Bob (D’Onofrio), a taxi-driving psychopath who captures a young boy (Evan Bird) after murdering and raping his mother. Once chained up in Bob’s remote…
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FrightFest 2012: ‘The Victim’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Cult actor Michael Biehn makes his directorial debut with The Victim (2011), screening at this year’s Film4 FrightFest. This weak attempt at grindhouse opens with two local cops taking two strippers into the woods for a ‘private party’. One of the crooked cops gets carried away and ends up murdering one of the strippers…
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Film Review: ‘Circumstance’
★★★★☆ American Iranian director Maryam Keshavarz debuts with Circumstance (2011), the sensual tale of a complex love triangle set in the swirling underground party scene of Tehran. A wealthy, liberal family struggle to cope with the increasing sexual rebellion of their daughter Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), who is falling in love with her best friend Shireen…
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Interview: Maryam Keshavarz, ‘Circumstance’
American-Iranian director Maryam Keshavarz is a woman who doesn’t fear courting controversy – a fact very much apparent in her first feature, Circumstance (2011), which claimed the Sundance Audience Award back in 2011. The film follows two wild-spirited teenage girls living in Iran (Sarah Kazemy and Nikohl Boosheri) who, tired of the rules and religious…
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Film Review: ‘The Imposter’
★★★★★ All great documentaries start with a fascinating subject, and Bart Layton’s The Imposter (2012) has one of the most bizarre and compelling you may ever hear. The film focuses upon the mysterious Frédéric Bourdin, who manages to convince a grieving Texan family that he is their sixteen-year-old son, Nicholas Barclay, who went missing three…
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DVD Review: ‘The Monk’
★★☆☆☆ Based on the Gothic novel by Matthew G. Lewis, German director Dominik Moll’s fourth feature The Monk (2011) delves deep into the world of an 18th century Spanish Capuchin monastery, where one of its most revered brethren is drawn towards the black arts of sin and the supernatural. Abandoned on the steps of the…