Reviews
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Film Review: De Palma
★★★★☆ It is both continually amusing and rather unexpected that the most offensive exclamation uttered by a director famed for gun battles, bloody violence and pushing the barriers of visual storytelling is “Holy mackerel!” De Palma is an illuminating, engrossing and reverent documentary from fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow that benefits from mild…
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Film Review: Baden Baden
★★★☆☆ Rachel Lang’s Baden Baden is a simple story of an aimless woman returning to her hometown and building a new shower stall for her grandmother. Not much else happens in terms of traditional plot, yet this arthouse oddity is an impossibly fragile and emotionally robust drama about identity, positioned on a razor’s edge between…
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Film Review: Aloys
★★★☆☆ Convention dictates that relationship dramas are, at their core, about the connection between two people. Although Tobias Nölle’s Aloys ostensibly adheres to this formula, it spends more time probing a far more interesting and unorthodox relationship; that between a person and their physical surrounds. Before a single individual appears on screen, Simon Guy Fusser’s…
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Film Review: 31
★★★★☆ “Shall we do this Whitechapel-style, then?” Doom-Head (Richard Brake) asks, rhetorically, to final girl Charly (Sheri Moon Zombie), in the penultimate scene of 31, the latest offering from Rob Zombie, a director whose films are the very definition of marmite cinema. Some might find Doom-Head’s line dripping in misogyny – given he is about…
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Film Review: The Infiltrator
★★★☆☆ The Infiltrator does exactly what is says on the tin. This Bryan Cranston-led real life crime drama, telling of a lengthy undercover sting operation to ensnare Pablo Escobar’s mid-80s Florida drug operations, may not reach the blood-splattered heights of The Departed or Donnie Brasco but like director Brad Furman’s former project, The Lincoln Lawyer,…
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Film Review: Hunt for the Wilderpeople
★★★☆☆ ‘Magestical’ isn’t necessarily a real word but it perfectly sums up Kiwi director Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Invented by Sam Neill’s gruff, illiterate grouch of an old codger, Hector, to describe a breathtaking mountaintop vista above New Zealand’s wilderness, in the company of hip-hop loving, fast-talking and lovable troublemaker Ricky Baker (Julian…
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Film Review: Blair Witch
★★★☆☆ Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the woods… It’s been seventeen years since unprepared audiences were first scared witless by a camping trip in the forest near Burkittsville, Maryland. The Blair Witch Project redefined the genre map, charting a new path through unfamiliar territory. Since then, that path has…
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DVD Review: Matinee
★★★★☆ Something of a forgotten gem, 1993’s Matinee sits between Gremlins and Toy Soldiers in director Joe Dante’s oeuvre. John Goodman steals the show as Lawrence Woolsey, a cigar-chomping director specialising in William Castle-esque theatrical gimmicks. Under the cloud of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he arrives in Key West, Florida to promote his latest atomic-themed…
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DVD Review: The Flight of the Phoenix
★★★★★ It’s not hard to see the appeal of Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix, a riveting adventure film featuring an all-star cast headed by Jimmy Stewart and Richard Attenborough. The premise, whereby fourteen men are stranded in the desert after a plane crash, is classic Saturday matinee material. The film’s success lies in…
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DVD Review: A Scene at the Sea
★★★★☆ Having directed two crime films, Japanese director Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano downshifted in 1991 with A Scene at the Sea, a simple and direct fable about a young deaf man who becomes obsessed with surfing. Working as a garbage man, Shigeru (Claude Maki), finds a broken surf board and takes it home to repair it.…