Reviews
-
Film Review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
★★★☆☆ Is it possible, or even a good idea, to make a comedy about the war in Afghanistan? Directorial duo Glenn Ficara and John Requa certainly seem to think so. Partnering up with the ever wonderful Tina Fey and her regular writing collaborator Robert Carlock, the team adapts the memoir of Chicago Tribune reporter Kim…
-
Film Review: Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
★★★☆☆ In the 1960s, a group of pioneering artists decided to abandon what they saw as the stale and restrictive world of New York’s art galleries for the endless freedom of America’s great outdoors. Leaving behind the spatial limitations of the city, they ventured as far as Nevada, Utah and New Mexico to create artworks…
-
Film Review: The Seventh Fire
★★★★☆ “About 1/10 every ten years makes it out of here,” says a father exasperated by his drug-peddling son. The outlook for young members of the White Earth Indian Reservation is crushingly bleak. From the outset of The Seventh Fire, the first feature length documentary from Jack Pettibone Riccobono, it’s bracingly candid in both tone and…
-
Film Review: Our Kind of Traitor
★★★☆☆ After The Night Manager wowed audiences on the BBC, now another John le Carré adaptation comes to the silver screen. This time it’s Our Kind of Traitor, a contemporary espionage thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Harris. The duo star as Perry and Gail, a couple of Londoners on a make-or-break holiday in Marrakesh,…
-
Film Review: Mustang
★★★★☆ In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang, five young orphaned sisters – Lale (Günes Sensoy), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu), Ece (Elit Iscan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu) and Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) – full of life and natural vigour discover the price of womanhood in a conservative, patriarchal society intent on suppressing it. Present day rural Turkey…
-
Film Review: Green Room
★★★☆☆ When John Carpenter made Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976, he readily acknowledged the influence he drew from George A. Romero in crafting the homogeneous zombie-like horde of gang members laying siege to an L.A. police station. This served to dehumanise the antagonists, and side-stepped the responsibility of delving into the knotty politics of…
-
Film Review: Everybody Wants Some!!
★★★★☆ Richard Linklater once again casts his outwardly laid-back yet deceptively astute gaze on those loitering around the edge of adulthood with Everybody Wants Some!! – a joyous and often uproarious portrayal of college-age adolescence and the alluring freedom that brings. Much like the frosty and subdued welcome the film’s central character receives when first…
-
Film Review: Cabin Fever
★☆☆☆☆ When film fans heard that a remake of Eli Roth’s 2002 horror Cabin Fever was on the horizon, it is safe to say that many were baffled. Roth’s original horror movie – which sees five young students blow off college work for a weekend of mischief in the woods – became one of the…
-
DVD Review: Janis: Little Girl Blue
★★★☆☆ “Take another little piece of my heart,” Janis Joplin famously wails in Piece of My Heart. In Janis: Little Girl Blue, Amy Berg has lovingly reassembled those pieces, seemingly scattered over the most musically-critical decade in our recent history, and shaped them back into the bright star that was Joplin herself. While it is…
-
Film Review: Truman
★★★★☆ When a theatre actor bumps into old acquaintances at a restaurant and says “my run’s almost over” it usually means he is to move onto another play, another role. For Julián (Ricardo Darin), who has made the decision to discontinue his cancer treatment, the expression has a tongue-in-cheek, tragicomic finality. Truman, from Barcelona native…