Reviews
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DVD Review: ‘Knight and Day’
★★☆☆☆ Tom Cruise often comes across as a pint-sized, arrogant, pampered Hollywood cliché, and his notorious appearance on The Oprah Winfrey show could (and perhaps should) have been the final nail in his career’s 5ft solid gold coffin, yet Cruise somehow bounced back onto screens earlier this year with the globe-trotting action adventure Knight and Day (2010).Knight and…
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DVD Review: ‘The Expendables’
★★★★☆ The intent behind The Expendables (2010) is now legendary; a chance to bring back the past action stars of yore, all heralded under heavyweight director/writer/star Sylvester Stallone’s banner. The Expendables introduces (or should that be re-introduces) us to a gang of mercenaries, hard as nails but with hearts as big as their biceps, including…
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Film Review: ‘The War You Don’t See’
★★★★☆ I’m not going to review John Pilger’s documentary The War You Don’t See (2010). It’s beyond critique and to be honest, it’s had such a profound effect on me that at the moment my role as a film reviewer seems shallow and ridiculous. Such cinematic discussions have their time and place and I’m sure…
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Theatrical Releases: ‘The Thorn in the Heart’
Have you ever made a film about your Aunt Suzette? Michel Gondry has. Why should you care? Maybe you don’t like watching other people’s home movies. Maybe you don’t even have an Aunt Suzette. Watching Gondry’s autobiographical documentary The Thorn in the Heart (2009) isn’t likely to change either of those very much.It’s a project about…
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Film Review: A Serbian Film
★☆☆☆☆ There are, it would seem, a growing number of films that can claim to have at one stage carried the hallowed moniker ‘the most controversial film of all time’. Controversy is, of course, entirely subjective – Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) was controversial in the context of its religious content, whilst…
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Film Review: Machete
★★★☆☆ Machete (2010) is a feature length expansion of the brilliant, initially faux trailer that was spliced between director Rodriguez and buddy Quentin Tarantino exploitation homage Grindhouse (2007). Starring Danny Trejo as the titular character, with accompaniment from a host of recognisable names and faces, Machete is the tale of an ex-Federale who is double-crossed when…
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DVD Releases: ‘Erasing David’
In Erasing David (2009), film maker Bond (…David Bond) sets out to follow his 007 namesake into a hidden world where no-one knows his name or recognises his face. Leaving behind his wife, daughter and unborn child, David tests just how far the all-seeing eyes of the state can see and whether, in today’s day…
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DVD Review: ‘Look At What The Light Did Now’
★★★★☆ With Look at What the Light Did Now (2010), US musician Feist presents something more than just a run of the mill music documentary, charting the highs and lows of success or a life on the road. Instead, she documents a passage of time in which herself, her band and a handful of experimental…
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DVD Releases: ‘White Material’
Clare Denis’ White Material (2010) combines beautiful cinematography, meticulously placed ambient music and a cast of stimulating characters to portray a very evocative and open-ended drama. The framing of the wild land of Africa helps to decentralise the individual performances of its cast by juxtaposing them with one another; the images of this untamed continent…
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DVD Releases: ‘The Silent Army’
In northern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children as young as nine are forced into armed conflict. Traumatised and brutalised, the child soldiers find themselves participating in horrific massacres. Thousands die in this way. Congo-born director, Jean van de Velde, has brought this sobering subject to the screen in The Silent Army (2008).…