DVD Review: ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’
★★★☆☆ Matthew Vaughn’s slick second collaboration with writer Mark Millar, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), brings together the kinetic energy and shock humour of...
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
★★★☆☆ Matthew Vaughn’s slick second collaboration with writer Mark Millar, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), brings together the kinetic energy and shock humour of...
★★★★☆ Consciously attempting to remedy British cinema’s dirge of contemporary war films, outshone as they usually are by the superior American model, Kajaki (2014),...
★★★★☆ Jauja (2014), the tantalisingly absurdist new feature from Argentinian Lisandro Alonso, is a film that lives and dies by its final act. Without...
★☆☆☆☆ Watching the completely feckless and puerile outing that is The Interview (2014) is to watch the death of a bromance. Seth Rogen and...
★★★★☆ The feature debut of playwright debbie tucker green, Second Coming (2014) opens with a shot of a murmuration of starlings. Their symbolic meaning...
★★★★☆ There have been several films over the past few years that have sought to engage with the subject of creativity and the pursuit...
★★★☆☆ The laws of diminishing returns dictate that as a film series goes on, the more rote and tired that series becomes. Unless you’re...
★★☆☆☆ Chess has always leant itself kindly to cinema, affording both wider allegorical application and pleasing visual opportunities. Four Corners (2013) is the second...