Reviews
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DVD Review: ‘The Social Network’
★★★★☆ Fresh from its recent BAFTA success comes the DVD release of David Fincher’s highly acclaimed ‘Facebook flick’, The Social Network (2010). The story is simple: Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg) is a geeky computer genius who is dumped by his girlfriend due to his rampant egomania and lack of emotion. He returns to his Harvard…
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Film Review: ‘True Grit’ (2010)
★★★★☆ American writer Charles Portis’ 1968 revisionist Western novel True Grit is an incredibly tight, well paced and highly cinematic thriller, so it came as little surprise when the text was originally adapted for the silver screen by director Henry Hathaway in 1969, just a year after the book was first published.Featuring John Wayne in…
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Film Review: ‘Son of Babylon’
★★★★★ Son of Babylon (2009) is set in 2003, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall, and tells the story of a Kurdish grandmother and the search for her son, Ibrahim, a soldier missing since the Gulf War in 1991. A letter from a fellow soldier informs her that he had been arrested and…
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DVD Releases: ‘True Grit’ (1969)
With its release in 1969, Henry Hathaway’s original adaptation of Charles Portis’ True Grit breathed new life into a tiring Western genre. The Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone had stolen the interest of a culturally evolving American audience, one whose values were transforming in relation to the major changes happening in the world of pop culture, and…
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DVD Review: ‘I Spit on your Grave’
★☆☆☆☆ Back in the 1980s when The Evil Dead (1981), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) were still banned in Britain by the then draconian BBFC and the 1984 Video Recordings Act, there were a lot of films floating around which gained an audience, not because they were any good, but…
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DVD Releases: ‘Bella’
Alejandro Gomez Monteverde’s Bella (2006) is an emotional, well acted film about mistakes and second chances. The story follows the entwined lives of three people: Jose (Eduardo Verástegui), a former footballer whose dream of making it into the professional leagues is taken away by a terrible accident; Manny (Manny Perez), Jose’s adopted brother, who wants to…
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DVD Releases: ‘Peepli Live’
As an Aamir Kahn production, Peepli Live (2010) automatically carried with it a lot of respect and hype from the world of Indian Cinema. Directed and written by Anusha Rizvi, the film tells the tale of two brothers, Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) and Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), whose farm is about to be seized by the…
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DVD Review: ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’
★★★☆☆ Being that director Thor Freudenthal has only one previous feature to his name, and that being Hotel For Dogs (2009), you’ll forgive me for approaching his second outing, Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010), with a hint of trepidation. As a somewhat cynical twenty-something, it’s always hard to review the kind of wholesome, well meaning…
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Film Review: ‘Rabbit Hole’
★★★★☆ Whilst Nicole Kidman’s recent Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actress’ at this year’s upcoming 83rd Academy Awards came as a surprise to many, few would probably still contest the decision having witnessed the Antipodean actress’ superb latest performance in John Cameron Mitchell’s impressive debut feature Rabbit Hole (2010).Based on playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s stage play of the same name…
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Film Review: ‘The Fighter’
★★★☆☆ A lot can happen in six years. Just six years ago, the planet was still iPhone free, Tony Blair was ruling the country and if asked about 3D cinema, most members of the public would probably have dismissed the concept as an archaic, faddish novelty. It was also just over six years ago that we…