Reviews
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Film Review: The Girl King
★★☆☆☆ This latest film from Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki makes an adolescent drama out of the true story of 17th century Queen Kristina (Malin Buska), who became Sweden’s first native female sovereign aged just six. Amidst an ongoing European conflict between Catholics and Protestants, she grows up in a conservative Lutheran court and the tutelage…
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Film Review: Down By Love
★★☆☆☆ Amour fou in a French penitentiary has Blue is the Warmest Colour star Adele Exarchopoulos falling in love with the prison warden in Pierre Godeau’s slickly-produced true-story tale of forbidden passion, Down By Love. We first meet Anna (Exarchopoulos) as she arrives at a prison to await her trial. Focusing on her familiar features…
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Film Review: The Conjuring 2
★★★★★ Based on one of the most famous poltergeist cases in the annals of paranormal investigation, The Conjuring 2 takes real-life ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) off to the outer rim of suburban London. From 1977 to 1979, a council house on a quiet street in Enfield was said to…
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Film Review: Fire at Sea
★★★★☆ The adventures and anxieties of a young boy, one who possesses impetuous curiosity and imagination and whose gestures resemble the stature of a much older man, are shown in contrast to the traumatic experiences of migrants seeking refuge on the island of Lampedusa in Fire at Sea. For Golden Bear winner Gianfranco Rosi’s fifth…
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Film Review: The Nice Guys
★★★★☆ There’s no better way to transport a cinemagoer back to the late 1970s than with Papa was a Rolling Stone by The Temptations. The tap of a snare drum and slow groove of a rhythmic bassline set a steady beat for The Nice Guys, a mordant crime caper and buddy movie from writer-director Shane…
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Film Review: Me Before You
★★☆☆☆ Self-adapted by author Jojo Moyes, Me Before You has an interesting conceit, yet consistently undermines it by resorting to cheap and ever predictable rom-com cliches that have a habit of irritating beyond belief. Louisa (Emilia Clarke), a quirky and bouncy twenty-something, spends her life supporting her hard-to-do family. When she’s fired from one job,…
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Film Review: The Measure of a Man
★★★☆☆ The Measure of a Man, a third collaboration between French director Stéphane Brizé and veteran actor Vincent Lindon in just six years, is a pared-down social critique that charts the day-to-day drudgery of a man suffering the slings and arrows of economic recession. It’s far from a joyous viewing experience but fans of the…
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Film Review: Holding the Man
★★☆☆☆ Adapted from a 1995 memoir of the same name by Australian actor Timothy Conigrave, Holding the Man recounts the star-crossed love of a lifetime between the writer and his athletic, handsome beau, John Caleo. Both men would succumb to AIDS-related illnesses and it is a pity that this layered and temporally-shifting recollection, that spans…
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DVD Review: Pandemic
★★☆☆☆ While there’s nothing especially wrong with videogame-inspired zombie flick Pandemic, there’s not much that this rote genre entry gets especially right, either. In 2016, there’s no shortage of zombie films. Nor is there a dearth of found footage movies, and with this year’s releases of Hardcore Henry, Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed, neither are films…
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DVD Review: Blood Bath
★★★☆☆ 1966 vampire film Blood Bath surely has one of the most convoluted production histories in cinema. Produced by the king of schlock himself, Roger Corman, the film started life in 1963 as Operation: Titian, a dull-as-dishwater crime thriller about the theft of a priceless painting in Dubrovnik. Corman was unhappy with the result, and…