Reviews
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Film Review: ‘The Past’
★★★★☆ One of a number of talented Iranian creatives currently working outside their own country (some, like fellow director Jafar Panahi, are unable to vacate), Oscar-winning filmmaker Asghar Farhadi leaves behind the miasma of his home nation for the Paris-set The Past (2013), another fantastically intricate exercise in domestic complexity. Starring regular collaborator Ali Mosaffa,…
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Film Review: ‘My Stuff’
★☆☆☆☆ Following a breakup with his girlfriend, My Stuff (2013) director Petri Luukkainen decides to put all of his worldly possessions into storage and retrieve them one item per day, ridding himself of the ennui caused by his cluttered life. Helped by friends who look on with a mixture of wry amusement, scepticism and bewilderment,…
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Film Review: ‘Muppets Most Wanted’
★★★☆☆ The lights have been lit once more for James Bobin’s Muppets Most Wanted (2014), a somewhat lacklustre follow-up to his 2011 comeback hit The Muppets, with Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais replacing Amy Adams and Jason Seigel as the film’s human points of interest. In The Muppets, the fuzzy little furballs of fun were…
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Film Review: ‘Dangerous Acts’
★★★★☆ In Dangerous Acts (2013), Madeleine Sackler documents a year in the life of the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT), an acclaimed theatrical troupe forced to work underground in their native country. President Lukashenko, often dubbed Europe’s last remaining dictator, has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for the past twenty years. Free expression is suppressed…
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Film Review: ‘Almost Married’
★☆☆☆☆ Exactly the sort of unforgivable dross that represents a stunning indictment of the British filmmaking machine, Ben Cookson’s Almost Married (2014) is a crushingly unconvincing sex comedy that may not surpass 2004’s Sex Lives of the Potato Men in its grotesqueness, but certainly reminds you of it – which is bad enough. A film…
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Film Review: ‘Afternoon Delight’
★☆☆☆☆ With Afternoon Delight (2013), actress Kathryn Hahn and director Jill Soloway emerge from the shadows of male-centric comedy filmmaking. An apparently edgy, neurotic comedy about the awkward truths of contemporary middle-class culture, Soloway sadly lacks the sagacity required to unearth the roots of the existential malaise her film is awkwardly fumbling at. Hahn is…
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Film Review: ’20 Feet from Stardom’
★★★☆☆ It’s indomitable personalities and powerhouse voices that shine through in Morgan Neville’s enjoyable ode to stellar backing singers, 20 Feet from Stardom (2013). The film scooped the Oscar for Best Documentary at last month’s star-studded ceremony and features exactly the blend of glamour, sentiment and toe-tapping music that one might expect to appeal to…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Stuff’
★☆☆☆☆ B-movie shams frequently present a finite line between cult wizardry and superfluous trash. Commonly, that line can be so blurred that the difference between good and bad is lost in the film’s lunacy. The Cold War camp of fifties sci-fi-cum-fantasy horror such as Douglas’s Them! (1954) or Yeaworth’s The Blob (1958) carry a capsuled…
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DVD Review: ‘Metéora’
★★★☆☆ Unceremoniously winching its way onto DVD this week despite contending for top honours at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Greek director Spiros Stathoulopoulos’ (PVC-1) snail-paced Metéora (2012) makes up for its lack of narrative dynamism through some deeply evocative religious symbolism and arresting vistas captured by Stathoulopoulos himself. Set amidst the mountaintop monasteries of…
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DVD Review: ‘Jeune & Jolie’
★★★☆☆ Hot on the heels of the highly acclaimed In the House (2012), suddenly prolific French auteur François Ozon returned last year with coming-of-ager Jeune & Jolie (2013), an engaging if overly diminutive story of a teenager’s blossoming sexuality set over four seasons. Having previously explored the combined mores, difficulties and ordinariness of sex and sexuality…