Reviews
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DVD Review: ‘Kiss of the Damned’
★★★★☆ We’ve seen a fair few vampire films do the rounds recently, but none of them are quite like Kiss of the Damned (2012), Xan Cassavetes’ throwback debut. It’s a hugely enjoyable and flamboyant work that combines sleek, cool aesthetics with giddy Eurotrash sensibilities. Like many notable vamp offerings, genre formalities are used as a…
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DVD Review: ‘Hannah Arendt’
★★★☆☆ Set around the publication of the incendiary New Yorker article on the heinous deeds and belated trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann by its titular German-American political theorist, Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012) is a glossy, plainly televisual depiction of one woman’s strongly-held and controversial beliefs. A European co-production between Germany, Luxembourg…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Epic of Everest’
★★★★☆ In 1921, the first attempt to scale Everest was launched. The expedition was exploratory in nature rather than a full–on assault, and although it failed to reach the peak, pioneering photographer and filmmaker Captain John Noel came back with footage and stills so remarkable that further attempts on the summit were inevitable. In 1922,…
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DVD Review: ‘Cutie and the Boxer’
★★★★☆ Amassing a considerable amount of buzz during last year’s festival circulation and now in the running for the Best Documentary Oscar, Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer (2013) arrives on DVD this week boasting a veritable trove of plaudits and awards, particularly for Heinzerling who won the Best Director Award at Sundance. Such acclaim…
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DVD Review: ‘The Complex’
★★☆☆☆ True J-horror fans will probably shudder at the thought of yet another lacklustre ghost story, and sadly The Complex (2013) is just that. Hideo Nakata was a seminal figure in the rise of the modern Japanese horror film, with Dark Water and the acclaimed Ringu franchise both having the dubious honour of receiving inferior…
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Film Review: ‘Teenage’
★★★☆☆ The notion of the ‘teenager’ dominates popular culture to such a degree that it’s difficult to reconcile the fact that the concept is a relatively new one. It’s the emergence of the term and, more crucially, the very idea of this isolated period in a young person’s life that concerns Matt Wolf’s innovative new…
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Film Review: ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’
★★★☆☆ Following on from Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford & Ben Affleck, Chris Pine is the latest actor to take on the mantle of the late American author Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst in Kenneth Branagh’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), a seriously safe series reboot which takes the character unsurprisingly back to his roots. We are…
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Film Review: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’
★★★★★ Sadly – though perhaps predictably – overlooked amid this year’s raft of Oscar nominations, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) thankfully doesn’t need lashings of awards to appeal to those who have admired the work of the brothers Coen over the course of the last three decades. Featuring a breakthrough lead turn from Oscar Isaac as…
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Film Review: ‘Grudge Match’
★★★☆☆ The great ‘who would beat who in their prime’ filmic boxing debate has always been a popular discussion, an ultimate what-if scenario that almost always yields outlandish answers. One such set-up is that of Rocky vs. Raging Bull, and though the time to see them duke it out at their peak has long since…
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Film Review: ‘The General’
★★★★★ Buster Keaton’s silent era masterpiece The General (1926) makes a welcome return to UK screens this week thanks to a new Cohen restoration and an ongoing BFI retrospective. Pin-sharp and as luxuriously entertaining as ever, this timeless tale of a lowly railway engineer caught up in the American Civil War due to the two…