Joseph Walsh
-
Film Review: ‘Jimi: All Is By My Side’
★★☆☆☆ John Ridley’s Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side (2013) is an intriguing shambles of a film. Denied rights by the Hendrix estate, the film looked doomed from the get go. This legal imposition turns out to be by the by, and the fact Jimi doesn’t bang out tune after tune from Hendrix’s…
-
Film Review: ‘The Babadook’
★★★★☆ Since Australian director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature, The Babadook (2014) premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival there has been a tremendous hubbub of excitement from both critical and horror circles . Much like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) before it The Babadook, appropriates the trappings of the horror genre and employs them in…
-
Blu-ray Review: ‘Withnail and I’
★★★★☆ Since its bow in 1987, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical black comedy, Withnail and I, has become a bona fide cult-classic. For years audiences have revelled in its depictions of drunkenness, drug addiction and camp debauchery. Subsequently, Robinson’s most well-remembered film has garnered a great deal of mythologising and alcohol-fuelled hyperbole. However, scythe through its now…
-
DVD Review: ‘Maleficent’
★★★☆☆ In the House of Mouse’s third attempt at reinventing a classic fairytale as a live action adventure, director Robert Stromberg brings us a new twist on Sleeping Beauty with Maleficent (2014), starring Angelina Jolie as the titular villain turned misunderstood hero. Opening to a CGI-heavy landscape, we meet a diminutive Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy) dwelling…
-
DVD Review: ‘In Secret’
★★☆☆☆ Longing, passion and an illicit love affair should be ripe material for any romping period drama. Sadly, actor-turned-director Charlie Stratton’s adaptation of Neal Bell’s play, In Secret (2013) – which is in turn based upon Émile Zola’s 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin – is a tonally perplexing disappointment that fails to truly wrestle with the…
-
Film Review: ‘The Boxtrolls’
★★★★☆ There’s more than a touch of the macabre to Laika Studios’ latest stop-motion adventure, The Boxtrolls (2014). With a spellbinding voice cast featuring Richard Ayoade, Nick Frost, Jared Harris and Ben Kingsley, we find ourselves tumbling through a world where diminutive trolls dwell in the subterranean caverns beneath Cheesebridge, a small cobbled town where…
-
DVD Review: ‘A Thousand Times Goodnight’
★★★☆☆ Erik Poppe’s globetrotting drama A Thousand Times Goodnight (2013) opens to an extraordinarily tense scene. War photographer Rebecca (French star Juliette Binoche) stands at a graveside in Kabul; women clad in black wail at the graveside, mourning the loss of a presumed loved one, before a figure within the grave rises. The woman, as…
-
DVD Review: ‘Next Goal Wins’
★★★★☆ With a title like Next Goal Wins (2014), you’d be forgiven for thinking that British filmmakers Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s debut documentary is all about the beautiful game – but you’d be wrong. At the centre of the story are the players who belong to the worst football team in the world, American…
-
Film Review: ‘Million Dollar Arm’
★★★☆☆ Only an actor with as much natural charisma as Mad Men star Jon Hamm (who plays ad man Donald Draper in the hit AMC show) could make a money-centric, hard-balling sports agent look appealing, and this is exactly what he does in Disney’s Million Dollar Arm (2014). Based on a true-story and directed by…
-
FrightFest 2014: ‘The Shining’ review
★★★★★ Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining (1980) is one of those rare films that has found itself submerged into the public consciousness across several generations. Continually parodied in popular culture, from The Simpsons to Family Guy, even those yet to have seen Jack Nicholson’s maniacal lead performance as Jack Torrance may well feel like…