Joseph Walsh
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DVD Review: ‘Les Diaboliques’
★★★★★ The BFI has recently restored and released Henri-George Clouzot’s French classic spine-chiller-thriller Les Diaboliques (1955). The restoration is a great achievement and the final result looks truly beautiful. Whilst the horror element in this classic is somewhat dated, the film still has the power to leave you with goose pimples. On its initial release…
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Film Review: ‘Little White Lies’
★★★★☆ This April sees the release of Guillaume Canets’ latest film, Little White Lies (2011). Canets is probably most well known for his performance in The Beach (2000), as Étienne, but he has also received critical attention for his last feature film Tell Know One (2006).With a vibe of The Big Chill (1983), we are…
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Film Review: ‘Forget Me Not’
★★☆☆☆ Forget Me Not (2010) could never be called original – a couple meet in an urban environment, have a wild night together and miraculously they fall for each other in a whirlwind romance has been done before (and a lot better than this, but not much) in films such as Before Sunrise (1995) and…
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Birds Eye View Film Festival 2011: Preview
Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Antonioni and Steven Spielberg; what do they have in common? Well, quite obviously they are all extremely well-known directors. The other thing they have in common is that they are all male. How often when reading a newspaper, a magazine or watching a tv show do you get to…
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Film Review: ‘Terry’
★★★☆☆ Nick Nevern’s debut Terry (2011) is an impressive first outing, more so when you consider that Nevern himself not only wrote, produced and directed the feature, but also starred. The plot hinges on a young film student, Charlie Ruez who makes a documentary in 2009 about the life of an unemployed, working-class man named…
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Film Review: ‘Carmen 3D’
★☆☆☆☆ It may seem cruel to be giving one of the most well known operas (and one that was well received during its run at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House) such a poor review. However, the central problem of Carmen 3D (2011) isn’t the opera; the performances are predominantly very good, with a fantastic cast including Christine…
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DVD Review: ‘The Living and the Dead’
★★★☆☆ Adapted by Josip Mlakic from his award-winning novel of the same name and directed by Kristijan Milic, The Living and the Dead (2007) tells the tale of two bands of soldiers who fight under exact same circumstances and in the same location, yet with half a century between them. Originally screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival…
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Barbican Film: Michelangelo Antonioni Directorspective
The highlight of the Barbican’s Michelangelo Antonioni Directorspective have arguably been the screenings of L’avventura (1960) and La notte (1961), the first two films of what has been described by critic Philip French as the “The Antonioni Walk,” an unofficial, loose trilogy of modernist films that explore the existential crisis of rich, beautiful characters who are bored with their lives.On…
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DVD Review: ‘Missing’
★★★★☆ If you were to read the synopsis of Missing (2009), you would probably expect a generic, non-sequitur horror flick full of the usual self-conscious moments of tension; but upon watching the film, you’ll discover one of the most complex psychopaths ever shown on screen, along with beautiful, subtle and powerful cinematography that rises above the…
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DVD Releases: ‘Peepli Live’
As an Aamir Kahn production, Peepli Live (2010) automatically carried with it a lot of respect and hype from the world of Indian Cinema. Directed and written by Anusha Rizvi, the film tells the tale of two brothers, Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) and Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), whose farm is about to be seized by the…