Reviews
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Film Review: Dragon Blade
★★☆☆☆ All those fans of cinema out there who have long wished for an action adventure epic set in 50 BC starring Jackie Chan, John Cusack and Adrien Brody need wait no longer. Dragon Blade – from Hong Kong writer-director Daniel Lee – is here. And it is inspired by true events. Cut down from…
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Film Review: Breakdown
★★☆☆☆ How many Fairbrasses does it take to knock together another hard-hitting, foul-mouthed, blood- splattered British crime movie? In the case of Jonnie Malachi’s Breakdown the answer is three. Man mountain and former Eastender Craig stars as Alfie Jennings, a vicious hitman who, predictably, is on the verge of a mental breakdown and wants out of…
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DVD Review: Hana-Bi
★★★★☆ Perhaps best known in the UK for his game show Takeshi’s Castle, actor-director ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano is as enigmatic and multi-talented an artist as he is a prolific filmmaker. In the first of three Blu-ray releases this year, Third Window films brings us Kitano’s Hana-Bi (1997), a beautiful and unsettling study of violence and…
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Film Review: A War
★★★★★ Writer-director Tobias Lindholm recaptures the hard-knuckled tension of 2012’s A Hijacking in his gripping third feature A War, recently upgraded to the nine-film shortlist for the foreign language Oscar. It more than deserves the credit – Lindholm’s film is one of the best movies about recent Western interventions into the Middle East, and a…
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Film Review: Partisan
★★★☆☆ Vincent Cassel possesses such a steely, lupine charm that he always engenders the characters he plays with subtle menace and ample charisma. His new film Partisan is no exception, giving the actor much of the heavy lifting to do in a deliberate almost-thriller that provokes many questions, but leaves explanation equivocally out of focus…
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Film Review: Bolshoi Babylon
★★★☆☆ Seen as Russia’s “secret weapon” by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, is it possible that the Bolshoi Ballet, a towering pillar of the nation’s culture, be justly compared to an ancient civilisation synonymous with oppression, corruption and vacuous luxury? Given its inextricable link to national identity and location a mere stone’s throw from the Kremlin,…
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DVD Review: Dope
★★☆☆☆ Initially coming off as a rather sharp and cheeky teen comedy, Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope prefers style over substance. What is set up in the first act as a charming if not typical story (a quirky black teen & his two pals get unwillingly drawn into neighbourhood drug wars) becomes dizzying and poorly executed in…
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Film Review: Sleeping with Other People
★☆☆☆☆ American playwright turned writer-director Leslye Headland received a fair amount of critical praise for her debut feature Bachelorette (2012), which saw a trio of women asked to be bridesmaids to a former victim of their school bullying. Her sophomore effort, Sleeping with Other People (2015), is an unfortunately hideous affair. Toplined by two skilled…
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Film Review: Le Mépris
★★★★★ Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic Le Mépris deserves to be seen on the big screen. There, it can ravish the senses and connect with the viewer in a way that is utterly lost on a television set. Godard’s film must surely rank as one of the best movie experiences of all time. It is that…
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Film of the Week: Joy
★★★★☆ Reinvention and familial turmoil have long been hallmarks of David O. Russell’s particular brand of knockabout cinema and his latest collaboration with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, Joy (2015), is a wonderful fairytale marriage of the two. It’s a banana flambé with extra rum that brazenly throws together folksy storytelling, arch soap opera melodrama…