Martyn Conterio
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Cannes 2019: Les Misérables review
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is uncompromising, angry-as-hell political cinema. Set over the course of two days during last year’s World…
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Film Review: Chi-Town
★★★☆☆ Selected for last year’s SXSW, Nick Budabin’s compelling fly-on-the-wall sports documentary Chi-Town (available now on iTunes) follows Chicago-born African-American college basketball star, Keifer Sykes, over the course of several years, as he pursues his big dream of playing in the NBA. At a swift and precise 79 minutes, Chi-Town packs a lot in. There’s…
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Film Review: Alita: Battle Angel
★★★★☆ A long-time James Cameron project, the king of the world handed over the reins of Alita: Battle Angel to Austin-based genre specialist Robert Rodriguez, while staying on as producer and co-screenwriter. The choice of director makes absolute sense, as both are positively evangelical about digital filmmaking and effects-driven storytelling. Based on Yukito Kishiro’s manga…
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Film Review: Lords of Chaos
★★★★☆ Lords of Chaos charts the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the increasingly bitter rivalry between two major players on the scene, which in 1993 led to the murder of musician Øystein Aarseth. Informing the audience the film we’re about to see is based on ‘truth and lies’, Jonas Åkerlund’s excellent second feature takes…
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#LFF 2018: Assassination Nation review
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip bat-shit crazy, Sam Levinson’s film is a declaration of war against the social and political…
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Film Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
★★★★★ Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old uses the latest in digital effects, 3D, frame-rate tinkering and colouration to take audiences back to the Great War 1914-1918, showing us what life was really like in the trenches. The resulting documentary is ground-breaking, poignant and eerie. Made to mark the end of the First World…
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#LFF 2018: All the Gods in the Sky review
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in the Sky. From its opening shots of a factory floor manufacturing sheet metal and the…
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#LFF 2018: The Nightshifter review
★★★☆☆ In Dennison Ramalho’s phantasmagorical morality tale The Nightshifter, a cuckolded coroner’s assistant with the ability to communicate with the recently departed takes revenge against his wife and her lover, in turn unleashing a living nightmare upon himself and his two kids. Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) is an absent father and husband. In early scenes,…
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DVD Review: Witness for the Prosecution
★★★★☆ While not amongst the greater, more celebrated titles in Billy Wilder’s acclaimed filmography, his big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution boasts a fine, scenery-chewing performance by Charles Laughton, here playing a cantankerous barrister defending a murder suspect. Leonard Vole (a miscast Tyrone Power, in his last screen appearance before dropping…
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Film Review: Under the Wire
★★★★☆ Chris Martin’s Under the Wire provides haunting testament and tribute to journalists Marie Colvin and Paul Conroy, as they sort to report on the civil war in Syria, subsequently uncovering crimes against humanity committed by dictator, Bashir al-Assad. In this extraordinarily divisive era we live in, where fake news, internet memes and conspiracy theories…