Reviews
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Film Review: ‘True Romance’
★★★★★ Cupid takes aim at the heart of London for the BFI’s Love season, which is showcasing a number of classic cinematic romances. A handful of these titles are also receiving a limited run in cinemas nationwide, including True Romance (1993) – a film which inexplicably failed to find much of an audience during its…
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Film Review: ‘Star Men’
★★★☆☆ In Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys (2000), the chisel-jawed actor-director and fellow geriatric pals Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner realise their life’s dream, blasting into space to rescue a falling satellite. Keeping their feet on terra firma and throwing down intergalactic knowledge rather than punches, the Star Men of filmmaker and astronomy…
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Film Review: ‘The Russian Woodpecker’
★★★★★ Chad Gracia’s superb doc The Russian Woodpecker (2015) premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and rode out of town with the Grand Jury Prize. A chilling account of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, it ties together the lead up to this tragic event and subsequent Soviet government cover-up, as well as pointing toward a…
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Film Review: ‘The Perfect Guy’
★★☆☆☆ While not entirely devoid of merit, David M. Rosenthal’s trashy erotic thriller The Perfect Guy (2015) poorly imitates Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992), along with a hundred other examples of the genre that it has cherry-picked from. Sanaa Lathan is the suited and booted lobbyist Leah – although her character is…
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Film Review: ‘My Nazi Legacy’
★★★★☆ David Evans’ My Nazi Legacy (2015) opens with a potent challenge – to imagine what it would be like to grow up as the child of a mass murderer. This hard proposal is just the beginning of what is a harrowing, complex documentary that expertly explores the legacy of the Holocaust through the intertwining history…
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Film Review: ‘Momentum’
★★☆☆☆ There’s only so much gravitas a Morgan Freeman voiceover can bring to a project. As Stephen Campanelli’s Momentum (2015) opens, he proclaims: “We are to engineer an event to shape the destiny of our country.” Platitudes and a handful of telephone calls aside, the power-hungry senator has little impact from the wood-panelled corridors of…
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Film Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2’
★★★★☆ There are few laughs in The Hunger Games franchise, and its final instalment Mockingjay – Part 2 may be the most po-faced of the lot. With the series’ two most reliable comic relief characters, Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), only making brief cameos, there’s little light to perforate the the…
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Film Review: Love
★★★★☆ On the surface, this heady relationship drama would appear to contain the same kind of combustible elements which have helped its director, cine-provocateur Gaspar Noé, garner his celebrated notoriety. Packed with explicit, unsimulated sex scenes (with the occasional multiple coupling thrown in for good measure), Love (2015) will be misconstrued by many as a…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Requiescant’
★★★★☆ The Spaghetti Western, as exemplified by The Good, The Bad, and Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in The West (1968), and Django (1966), is defined by its heightened visual style, its brutality, and its amorality. Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (1967), nicely presented here in a vibrant and crisp Blu-ray transfer, has the first two…
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DVD Review: ‘Minions’
★★★☆☆ It’s hardly a stretch to say that when Despicable Me debuted to enormous success in 2010, many of the accolades were being fired in the direction of its heaving mass of supporting players. From Jerry to Dave, to Phil to Tim, the yellow pill-shaped little blighters provided oodles of slapstick hilarity to complement Gru’s…