Reviews
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DVD Review: ‘Mr. Holmes’
★★★★☆ At the heart of Mr. Holmes (2015) lies that old John Ford maxim about printing the legend. Bill Condon’s film is an investigation into the trouble caused by creative licence and bending the truth. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character of course, but even so, but as an examination of facts and falsehoods, logic…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Hellraiser: Scarlet Box’
★★★★★ Clive Barker’s S&M Gothic fantasia has been poorly served (tainted even) by a string of DTV sequels. The Liverpool-born horror visionary’s Cenobites and Lament Configuration are without a shadow of a doubt among the most compelling creations in all of literature and genre cinema. The Pope of Pain – that’s Pinhead (played by Doug…
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DVD Review: ‘Cartel Land’
★★★★☆ The Mexican drug trade and its impact on the US has been documented in several films and shows from Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) and Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor (2013) to Breaking Bad and most recently Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015). The sense of hopelessness in the face of almost unimaginable brutality powered by the logic of…
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Film Review: ‘Paper Planes’
★★★☆☆ In the underdog story that was Dodgeball (2004), the teams of Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller went head-to-head in Las Vegas, the spectacle broadcast around the world on ESPN8. Another almost-sport worthy of ‘The Ocho’ would be the World Paper Plane Championships, which is sponsored, as fate would have it, by Red Bull. Australian…
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Film Review: ‘Mississippi Grind’
★★★★☆ With its loose road movie vibe and appealingly downtrodden turns from the two tremendous leads, Mississippi Grind (2015) certainly fits into the ‘they don’t make ’em like that anymore’ cinematic category. Writer/director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, no strangers to thoughtful character studies (Half Nelson, Sugar), are clearly more interested in spending time…
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Film Review: ‘The Black Panthers’
★★★☆☆ “The strength of the Black Panther Party was its youth, its idealism and its enthusiasm,” says an aging member towards the close of Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). “The weakness of the Black Panther Party was its youth, its idealism and its enthusiasm.” This tragic see-saw, which sees revolutionary enthusiasm digging the…
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DVD Review: We Are Still Here
★★★★☆ Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here (2015) is an aptly gruesome tribute to the halcyon days of 1980s splatter movies and the cosmic horror mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. It specifically channels and mimics the visual palette and tones of Lucio Fulci, the director who earned his stripes in the Italian genre filmmaking boom of…
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DVD Review: ‘Turbo Kid’
★★★★☆ Like it or not, we seem to be in the midst of a mini eighties revival which has seen the decade paid homage to in slick thrillers (Cold in July, The Guest) and more obvious Troma-like, B-movie exploitation fests (Hobo with a Shotgun, Manborg). Canadian/New Zealand co-production Turbo Kid (2015) definitely resides in the…
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DVD Review: ‘Love Is All’
★★★★☆ Over the decades montage has been used to offer knowledge to an audience rather than to make them feel. Clearly, nobody explained this to Kim Longinotto who traverses a century of British archival footage to craft the swooning and romantic Love Is All: 100 Years of Love & Courtship (2014). Expertly stitching together clips…
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DVD Review: ‘Jurassic World’
★★★★☆ Roaring in as this year’s monster box office hit over the summer, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World (2015) initially looked like it may struggle to live up to its heritage. Steven Spielberg’s original was a watershed moment for effects-driven cinema and no sequel could have replicated the slack jaws and spine-tingling awe of that initial…