Patrick Gamble
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Film Review: ‘The Tapes’
★★★☆☆ Shot on a meagre budget of £10,000, The Tapes (2011) is the debut feature from director Lee Alliston and Scott Bates and stars Mark Miller, Alliston and Mandy Lee Berger. Following the well-trodden found footage path, this intrinsically British take is a surprisingly accomplished attempt at injecting some much needed vigour into a now…
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Film Review: ‘Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times’
★★★☆☆ There’s something rather ironic about reviewing a documentary examining the decline of print media on an online movie blog. However, despite the global reach of the internet threatening to turn newspapers into a redundant medium, Andrew Rossi’s Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (2011) creates a compelling argument to those ready…
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Film Review: ‘Soul Surfer’
★☆☆☆☆ Sean McNamara’s Soul Surfer (2011) stars Anna Sophia Robb as real-life surfer Bethany Hamilton, brought into the world by two beach bum parents (played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt) and inheriting their passion for the sport. Bethany is described as a child with “salt water in her veins”, but when a devastating tiger…
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DVD Review: ‘Attack the Block’
★★★★☆ Attack the Block (2011) is Joe Cornish’s (of Adam & Joe fame) debut feature film – a hoodies versus aliens monster movie blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s science fiction. As equally scary as it is hilarious, this lovingly created, playful action/comedy hybrid hides a much more intelligent story behind its façade of…
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Film Review: ‘Bombay Beach’
★★★☆☆ Israeli director Alma Har’el has used her background in music video production (she directed videos for Beirut’s Elephant Gun and Postcards from Italy) to add a surrealist edge to her documentary Bombay Beach (2011), a dreamlike portrait of human endurance in all its varying guises.Bombay Beach focuses on a small American community inhabiting the…
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DVD Review: ‘8 Million Ways to Die’
★★☆☆☆ Directed by Hal Ashby, written by Oliver Stone and starring the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) should equate to a thrilling, yet touching tale of a cop gone rogue, but instead feels more like an extended late night version of Magnum, P.I. Bridges plays Matt Scudder, an alcoholic cop…
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DVD Review: ‘I Killed My Mother’
★★★☆☆ To coincide with the DVD release of his sophomore effort Heartbeats (2010) comes the re-issue of Xavier Dolan’s breakthrough film I Killed My Mother (2009) a deeply personal story of teen angst and the explosive relationship between a son and his overbearing mother, starring Anne Dorval, Dolan himself, François Arnaud and Suzanne Clément.Fresh faced…
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DVD Review: ‘Heartbeats’
★★★☆☆ French-Canadian writer, actor and director Xavier Dolan took the festival circuit by storm back in 2009 with I Killed My Mother (also rereleased on DVD this week). This promising debut quickly stapled his name onto every up-and-coming director list around. Heartbeats (2010) is Dolan’s sophomore effort and once again thrust this prolific young man…
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Raindance Film Festival 2011: Preview
This morning, the Raindance Film Festival – Europe’s leading independent film festival – released the programme for its 19th incarnation. Priding itself on championing the ‘little guy’, this year’s festival entries have been whittled down from the 3000 submissions to a more manageable collection of 98 features (all UK premieres) and 137 shorts.Opening this year’s…
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FrightFest 2011: ‘Kill List’ review
★★★★★ With Kill List (2011), Ben Wheatley (director of the critically acclaimed Down Terrace [2009]) has created this year’s most horrendously violent and bizarrely surreal film by simply amalgamating the generic conventions of a hitman thriller with the eerie iconography of occult horrors such as The Wickerman (1973).Jay (Neil Maskell) hasn’t worked in eight months,…