Reviews
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Film Review: Eisenstein in Guanajuato
★★★☆☆ Striking, controversial pieces of avant-garde filmmaking often contain one scene where the line in the sand of mainstream cinema is well and truly obliterated. The Odessa steps sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin stands as an unparalleled and much-studied example. After a number of early warning shots in Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato –…
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Film Review: The Brand New Testament
★★★☆☆ Madcap invention is nothing new to Belgian Jaco Van Dormael, who takes on the Almighty himself in his new high-concept comedy The Brand New Testament. Concept is certainly king in this instance, giving the filmmaker with a corking elevator pitch that is mined for genuine amusement but never quite manifests as something with the…
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DVD Review: The Merchant of Four Seasons
★★★★☆ Producing more work in his short fifteen-year career than most directors do in a lifetime, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is emblematic of the New German Cinema movement, and remains a powerful voice of avant-garde European cinema. In the first of a new collection, Arrow Video bring us ten of Fassbinder’s most interesting pictures,…
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Film Review: Nasty Baby
★★★★☆ The latest film from Sebastián Silva, Nasty Baby is a 1970s Woody Allen movie for the hipster generation. The existential, chain-smoking intellectuals of Manhattan are displaced by scooter-riding conceptual artists, who drink out of mason jars, fill gentrified apartments with potted plants and go rock climbing in Brooklyn. A poignant, heartfelt and ultimately troubling…
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Film Review: Midnight Special
★★★★☆ “Let the Midnight Special shine a light on me.” So go the lyrics of the folk song from which Jeff Nichols took the title of his fourth feature, Midnight Special. The refrain is fitting, as Nichols’ film is one about devotion. It’s also a pulsating science fiction thriller that’s ultimately about an awful lot…
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Film Review: The Last Man on the Moon
★★★☆☆ Not too many men can sit by a campfire at night, look up at the moon and know that they once bounded across its chalky grey surface. Gene Cernan is one of only twelve lucky souls to have done so, leaving the final human footprints of the Apollo missions in its lunar dust. The…
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Film Review: The Huntsman: Winter’s War
★★☆☆☆ Four years on from Rupert Sanders’ critically derided yet financially lucrative Snow White and The Huntsman we have the delayed, inevitable follow-up: The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Chris Hemsworth is back as the axe-wielding hero in a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. In many ways this is an adult Frozen with…
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Film Review: Dheepan
★★★★☆ Jacques Audiard is a strict adherent to the notion of quality over quantity. A career now spanning more than two decades customarily sees “the French Scorsese” spend three to four years in the development of a project. His seventh feature, Dheepan, does not bristle and hum with the same kind of violent magnetism as…
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Film Review: Couple in a Hole
★★★☆☆ If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Living a survivalist existence to rival any of Bear Grylls exploits deep in the Pyrenean wilderness are John (Paul Higgins) and Karen (Kate Dickie). Not the post-apocalyptic tale that one might expect from such an opening premise, Belgian director Tom…
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Film Review: Boulevard
★★☆☆☆ The majority of headlines and reviews on Boulevard – this one included – will preface any thoughts on Dito Montiel’s latest offering with the simple fact that it is Robin Williams’ last appearance onscreen. Considering the final performance of a cinematic great brings with it a tendency for nostalgia and, occasionally, undue praise, so…