Joseph Walsh

★★★★☆ There’s a fabled quote from 2004 written in The New York Times by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to the George W. Bush administration (later attributed to Karl Rove): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will…

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★★☆☆☆ French director Michel Gondry is well-known for his eccentricities and wild imagination. However, with his latest quirksome endeavour, Mood Indigo (2013), the director falls into the trap of artifice over art, neglecting both plot and themes in favour of wild flights of unsubstantiated fancy. Gondry has based his film on Boris Vian’s 1947 novel…

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★★★★☆ Let it be howled from the mountain tops that with his extraordinary Noah (2014), director Darren Aronofsky has crafted a bold, phantasmagorical interpretation of the Old Testament tale as we’ve never seen it before. In it, mankind – led by Tubal-Cain (British hardman Ray Winstone) – has spread like a cancer across the world,…

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★★★★★ “It’s the story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop” is just one of the many sublime, double-edged lines that Marilyn Monroe delivers in Billy Wilder’s gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot, re-released this week thanks to a brand new 4K restoration. The note of that line is pitch perfect,…

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★★☆☆☆ Following the global success of Julian Fellowes’ hit British television series, Downton Abbey director Brian Percival now casts his eye over Nazi Germany with an adaptation of Markus Zusak’s critically-lauded novel The Book Thief (2013). The film opens to a plummy Roger Allam voiceover as Death, informing us that the Grim Reaper has found himself…

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★★★★★ We live in a digital age, yet despite the onslaught of the constant increasing presence of technology in our lives, rarely do we consider how it’s changing our relationships with our friends, families and colleagues – let alone of emotional response to the technology we use. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) aims to open up…

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★★★☆☆ British filmmaker James Rouse (best known for his inventive adverts) makes his directorial debut with the lo-fi mockumentary Downhill (2014), the heart-warming tale of four men going through varying stages of mid-life crises as they embark on a coast to coast walk from St. Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay. Pitched as “a road movie,…

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★★★★☆ French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has demonstrated a deft ability for creating fantastical worlds, as previously seen in Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1995) and his big crossover hit, Amélie (2001). All of these showed a gift for aesthetically-pleasing oddities, and his new work, The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013), is no…

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★★★☆☆ Oculus (2013), the latest chiller from Salem-born director Mike Flanagan, began life as a short back in 2006. It went on to be widely-praised in horror circles, and now he has adapted into a feature-length supernatural chiller about a pair of siblings that believe that a haunted antique mirror is responsible for their parents’…

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★★★★☆ Inspiration for Amma Asante’s sophomore feature, Belle (2013), was a tad unconventional; an 18th century painting entitled Dido and Elizabeth, which depicted a sprightly-looking, well-dressed black woman with her white cousin. By the standards of the day, this was a very unusual image that broke the social and artistic conventions of the age. Like…

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