Reviews
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Film Review: My Golden Days
★★★★☆ Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days follows Paul Dédalus (Quentin Dolmaire) on a path through adolescence into adulthood, as told by his older self (Mathieu Amalric). Paul is beaten up for sticking to his guns on a number of occasions. Bloodied, bruised and patched up by siblings Ivan (Raphael Cohen) and Delphine (Lily Taieb), he…
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DVD Review: ‘San Andreas’
★★☆☆☆ The disaster movie is the hallmark mainstay of the summer blockbuster. From its high point in the late 1990s with hits such as Independence Day (1996) and Armageddon (1998), nothing has traditionally drawn crowds more than the sight of familiar vistas being reduced to rubble. World events and the rise of superhero movies have…
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DVD Review: ‘The Look of Silence’
★★★★★ “You ask deeper questions than Joshua” states one of the killers in Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous collaborators’ documentary The Look of Silence (2014). The film is a companion piece to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2013), which revealed not only the mass murder of over one million suspected communists in a wave of…
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DVD Review: ‘Grace of My Heart’
★★☆☆☆ The 1960s were chock-full of fascinating musical figures, many of whom with larger-than-life tales to tell, yet director Allison Anders uses a fictitious counterpart (said to be loosely based on Carol King) as the basis of her follow up to failed anthology comedy, Four Rooms (1995). Now released on DVD for the first time,…
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DVD Review: ‘The Cut’
★★★☆☆ Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end of First World War, which also gave a new word to the English language – ‘genocide’, coined by Raphael Lemkin. Also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the state-sponsored murders were widely…
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DVD Review: ‘Beyond the Reach’
★★☆☆☆ The division between deranged villainy and complete buffoonery is a fine one. As bloodthirsty, silver-tongued businessman John Madec in French director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s Beyond the Reach (2014), Michael Douglas tramples all over the line drawn in the Mojave desert sand as a maniacal caricature of Gordon Gekko toting a high-calibre Austrian rifle. Based on…
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Film Review: ‘Zarafa’
★★☆☆☆ Kicking off an animated children’s film with a pair of terrified young slaves bound in chains being intimidated by a vicious mutt is unconventional to say the least. However, this is the departure point chosen by the directorial pairing of Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie whose new film, Zarafa (2012), takes as its inspiration…
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Film Review: ‘The Walk’
★★★☆☆ New Yorkers staring skywards from below the World Trade Center, struck by a sense of terror and confusion, evokes dark memories of the not too distant past. However, in The Walk (2015), the latest film from Robert Zemeckis, the onlookers’ bewildered emotions are mingled with admiration, awe and sheer disbelief. This is due to…
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Film Review: ‘Unbreakable’
★★★★☆ As much as writers and film critics in particular like to pronounce upon storytelling and the experiences of others, some tales are so miraculous and awe-inspiring that any words will completely fail them. The expression ‘triumph over adversity’ is used altogether too frequently nowadays to describe all manner of things – such as a…
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Film Review: ‘Suffragette’
★★★★☆ The ongoing battle for equality of the sexes is an issue that is constantly debated in the media – and rightly so. The sense that there’s still a great deal of work to be done in society is the message at the heart of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015), which follows a group of women…