Reviews
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Film Review: ‘Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3D’
★★☆☆☆ As ham acting goes, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011) is a big fat hog roast with a side order of crackling. Nicolas Cage returns as Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider, cranking up his patented nervous ticks and wide maniacal eyes to 11, but we’ve seen it to many times and he is now officially tap…
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Film Review: ‘Position Among the Stars’
★★★★☆ Over a decade in the making, Position Among the Stars (2010) is the final instalment of Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich’s trilogy of documentaries following the lives of the Sjamsuddin family. Acting as a portal into the lives of just one of many improvised families currently living amongst the fragile shanty towns of Jakarta,…
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Film Review: ‘The Woman in the Fifth’
★★★★☆ Paweł Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth (2011) – starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas – is stylishly shot, slickly directed and frustratingly enigmatic. Pawlikowski cut his teeth in documentary filmmaking, forging a name for himself in the 1990s, and remarkably this is only his third feature film to date. Hawke plays Tom…
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DVD Review: ‘Urbanized’
★★★★☆ We tend to identify our sense of a city with its architecture; Paris for its artful designs throwing back to the country’s rich history and Manhattan, a city created like Lego blocks. Like so many other cities in the world, both have had architects take scalpels to their streets in an effort to create…
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DVD Review: ‘Boca’
★★★☆☆ The lavishly produced and stylish crime thriller Boca (2012) – directed by Brazilian filmmaker Flavio Frederico and based on the autobiography of Hiroito, ‘The King of Boca do Lixo’ – makes for enjoyable viewing. Set amidst the brothels and nightclubs of 1950s São Paulo, Hiroito (Daniel de Oliveira) rises to become one the region’s…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
★★★☆☆ Casting a critical eye over sacred films based on sacred texts is a pretty thankless task, especially when the story happens to be Harper Lee’s lauded and beloved To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Recently restored and rereleased on Blu-Ray to celebrate its 50th Anniversary, old believers can enjoy a return to trip to Maycomb…
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DVD Review: ‘Abduction’
★☆☆☆☆ Directed by John Singleton and featuring an all-star cast which includes The Twilight Saga star Taylor Lautner and young actress Lily Collins (soon to star in Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror) alongside Sigourney Weaver, Maria Bello, Jason Isaacs and Alfred Molina, Abduction (2011) is a glossy action-thriller about lost identities and the pursuit of truth.Lautner plays Nathan,…
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DVD Review: ‘There Be Dragons’
★★☆☆☆ Let’s be clear about this – there are no dragons in Roland Joffé’s There Be Dragons (2011). Or, rather, the dragons are metaphorical. If that knowledge makes you fear a long and turgid film from Joffé, you’d be right – but not for those reasons. There Be Dragons doesn’t suffer from a lack of…
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DVD Review: ‘Sound It Out’
★★★★☆ Take an independent music store in a neglected area of the North East, a couple of diehard metal fans, a Status Quo rocker who wants to be buried in a coffin made of his own vinyl collection, and ‘charming’ is hardly the first word that springs to mind. But charm is exactly what Jeanie…
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East Winds Film Festival 2012: Preview
In the middle of last week, Third Window Films in conjunction with the Coventry University East Asian Film Society (CUEAFS) officially announced the line-up for the second edition of the East Winds Film Festival, which will take place from 2-4 March 2012. Along with retrospectives of the works of established film-makers Miki Satoshi and Herman…