Patrick Gamble
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DVD Review: ‘Horns’
★★☆☆☆ Combing a nostalgic yet bittersweet longing for childhood innocence with a devilish plunge into the deepest recesses of human depravity, Alexandre Aja’s Horns (2014) is truly a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie. A smorgasbord of genre tropes, welded together with great dexterity and dark sophistication, the results are sadly a disjointed and tonally incoherent…
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HRWFF 2015: Read our preview
Continuing its mandate of highlighting the abundance of human rights violations and shocking injustices that occur globally each day, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival looks to disrupt the escapist narratives of the multiplex with a week and a half of challenging and eye-opening films from around the world. A soapbox for many of the…
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Film Review: ‘Still Alice’
★★★☆☆ It’s impossible to pinpoint the first memory embezzled under Alzheimer’s rampage through the tangled web of neurons and chemical pulses of the human brain. Since even the healthiest of minds can find itself prone to moments of absent-mindedness the illness looms large over all of us, especially in an ageing society that clings to…
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Film Review: Life of Riley
★★★☆☆ The play was once again the thing for Alain Resnais, as theatre serves as the backcloth for The Life of Riley (2014), his final film and the follow up to follow-up to 2013’s Cannes Competition entry You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (itself based upon Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice). This time around, Resnais chose to rework…
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Film Review: ‘Appropriate Behaviour’
★★★★☆ Neurotic self-analysis and a growing sense of entitlement have become a staple of the New York comedy scene. From Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) to Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010) the city that never sleeps would appears to be tossing-and-turning over a deep-seated sense of insecurity. Desiree Akhavan (creator of the cult web series The…
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Film Review: Catch Me Daddy
★★★★☆ Daniel and Matthew Wolfe’s music video for The Shoes’ Time to Dance starred Hollywood actor Jake Gyllenhaal as a unaffected serial killer preying on Dalston’s swelling hordes of hipsters. Unsurprisingly the promo went viral and gained them instant notoriety. Their debut feature Catch Me Daddy (2014) is a film that engages in a far…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Black Coal, Thin Ice’ review
★★★☆☆ Cowardice, treachery and bloody murder coalesce in director Diao Yinan’s Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), a tonally erratic noir that blends the aesthetics and absurd comicality of Johnnie To with a mainstream cop procedural. The apathy and social malaise of Northern China’s contemporary heartbeat provides the rhythm for Yinan’s ostentatious detective drama – a…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Sworn Virgin’ review
★★★★☆ Explorations of transgender life have become more prevalent in world cinema. Breaking down the binary narrative of sexuality these stories not only give a voice to an under-represented group, they’ve also been employed to examine issues of national and political identity. With Sworn Virgin (2015), Laura Bispuri presents us with a new angle. The…
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Berlin 2015: ‘The Forbidden Room’ review
★★★★☆ Guy Maddin has fashioned a distinctive identity by harnessing cinematic nostalgia and forging it into something entirely original. His films are like discovering a neglected canister of film containing a story from a forgotten time that’s been lovingly repaired and projected for posterity. His anarchic disregard for form means his films often resemble a…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Life’ review
★★★☆☆ There is plenty of focus but little flash in Anton Corbijn’s Life (2015), a snapshot of one of cinema’s most enduring icons. A renowned photographer, Corbijn knows a thing or two about capturing the elusive essence of stardom, yet in his handsome portrait of James Dean’s burgeoning rise to fame there’s something noticeably absent…