Reviews
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DVD Review: ‘Jessabelle’
★★★☆☆ Jessabelle (2014) makes a good case that horror movies can succeed without – or rather in spite of – the requirement to scare the viewer. Is that a paradox, a disappointment or even a perversion? Ghost train thrills have their place, but the genre will always be at its best when an air of…
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DVD Review: ‘In Order of Disappearance’
★★★★☆ Delectable riffs of the Coens and Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters (2011) make In Order of Disappearance (2014) one of the smartest and certainly most subversive Nordic noirs of recent years. A sharp-as-ice-pick black comedy anchored by a deadpan Stellan Skarsgård performance, this acted revenge is indeed best served cold. Skarsgård’s Nils, a Swede who’s settled…
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DVD Review: ‘The Haunting of Black Wood’
★★★☆☆ There have been a recent bumper crop of cabin in the woods pictures in recent years: Baghead (2008), Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012), its excellent no-budget spiritual cousin Resolution (2013) and the Evil Dead (2013) remake. You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing left for this…
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Film Review: ‘Trash’
★★★★☆ Stephen Daldry‘s latest feature film, set among the garbage heaps of Rio de Janeiro, belongs to its youthful, non-professional cast. Trash (2014) opens with Jose Angelo (Wagner Moura) hurriedly packing. As he attempts to flee his apartment he is cornered by cops. Before his arrest, he throws a large wallet into a passing rubbish…
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Film Review: ‘Tales of the Grim Sleeper’
★★★★☆ The opening moments of Nick Broomfield’s Oscar long-listed documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014), call to mind the narrative inspiration for recent podcast, Serial. Pitching up in South Central L.A. in search of the story behind the eponymous serial killer, Broomfield is met with strident claims that the man awaiting trial has been…
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Film Review: ‘Son of a Gun’
★★☆☆☆ Julius Avery’s debut feature Son of a Gun (2014) starts promisingly in a maximum security prison where young JR (rising star Brenton Thwaites) has been sentenced to six months for some petty offence or another. The jail looks like a reformed and spruced-up version of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988) but here…
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Film Review: ‘Pelo Malo’
★★★☆☆ Winner of multiple awards on the 2013 festival circuit including the Golden Seashell in San Sebastian, Mariana Rondón’s Pelo Malo (2013) distorts your typical coming-of-ager about gender confusion into a well-observed Polaroid snapshot of contemporary anxieties in Venezuela, as well as the country’s deep social fissures economic and political disquiet. Set within the overpopulated…
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Film Review: ‘I Am Yours’
★★★☆☆ Expectations and desires are not coming together very easily in Iram Haq’s feature-length debut film, I Am Yours (2013). It is Haq’s second outing as director and writer but continues on themes she has already presented in her short film Little Miss Eyeflap (2009): tradition, desire and responsibility for one’s actions. These are all…
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Film Review: ‘Big Hero 6’
★★★☆☆ Comic book adaptations are fast becoming a staple element in the diet of blockbuster cinemagoers and, despite already owning Marvel, Disney have now decided to get in on the action themselves. Their first foray into the superhero universe comes in the eminently cuddly form of the inflatable robot Baymax (Scott Adsit), whose Kuleshov care…
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Film Review: Au Revoir Les Enfants
★★★★★ William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by the US novelist’s musing on the febrile relationship between memory, time and individual and collective…