Patrick Gamble

★★★★★ A meditative, often gruelling slowburner which explores concepts of ‘home’, Tsai Ming-liang’s remarkable Stray Dogs (2013) seeks to investigate the poor’s right to their own city within a phantasmagorical urban landscape. An immensely bittersweet work, Tsai evokes the poetry and tragedy of life lived on the margins of society. A father and his two…

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★★★☆☆ Despite cultivating an identity as one of cinema’s most loveable malcontents, Bill Murray’s achievements remain unrecognised by the Academy. However, thanks to Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent (2014), Murray finds himself in the running for the industry’s equivalent of canonisation; that holiest of holies – a Best Actor Oscar campaign. His role is that of…

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★☆☆☆☆ Even as far back as 1843, when Charles Dickens penned his illustrious novella A Christmas Carol, the materialism of Christmas was already apparent. Dickens wrote “Christmas is a poor excuse every 25 December to pick a man’s pocket” and it’s a cynical, yet astute statement that resonates even to this day. Fast-forward 171 years…

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★★☆☆☆ The internet use to be a place to hide, a refuge in which online gamers, chat room enthusiasts and message board trolls could cultivate a new identity. As the years have passed and the popularity of social media has risen Internet culture has evolved so that our online identities now pertain to mirror our…

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★★★☆☆ The Hunger Games has become a cultural phenomenon over the past seven years with Suzanne Collins’ alternative visions of gender and class inspiring audiences both young and old. Some fans can even be seen adorned in ‘Down with the Capitol’ t-shirts. However, with the franchise’s penultimate instalment, Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 (2014), Collins’…

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★★★★☆ The intensity of language and the beauty it conveys are visually explored in Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry (2010), a film which manages to fashion the vividly imaginative nature of a poem, against a narrative saturated with themes of human misery and which includes a breathtaking performance from one of South Korea’s most revered actresses –…

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★★★☆☆ Melissa McCarthy is the leading lady cinema needs, but she’s not necessary the one it wants. Co-written by McCarthy and her director husband Ben Falcone, Tammy (2014) is a Hollywood road movie for the neglected women of cinema. McCarthy plays the titular Tammy, a churlish underdog who’s wilfully unaware of her limitations, believing the…

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★★★☆☆ Saturday Night Live graduates Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader reunite as an eccentric brother-sister double act in Craig Johnson’s second feature; The Skeleton Twins (2014), an impressive drama about depression, dependency and the imperceptible umbilical cord that unites those existing outside of the norm. A wilfully bleak comedy where humour is a puzzle to…

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★★☆☆☆ Lynn Shelton has carved out a niche for herself by presenting the inertia of contemporary middle-class life and exploring the state of arrested development her characters often find themselves affected by. Her tales of self-actualisation, like Your Sister’s Sister (2011) and last year’s Touchy Feely aim to capture the brief moments of connection in…

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★★★★★ Andrey Zvyaginstev’s films are often characterised by a recurring focus on the breakdown of family values. Whilst Leviathan (2014) contains the same dense metaphysical imagery and spiritual philosophising of his previous work, here his layered social criticism is more solidified, illuminating a world governed by quarrelsome and belligerent men and the tragic human cost…

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