Blu-ray Review: ‘Empire of Passion’
★★★☆☆ Nagisa Ôshima is no stranger to controversial topics and challenging conflicts, mixing life, death, love, sex and passion into ultimately powerful experiences. He...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Reviews.
6 September 2024
Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
26 July 2024
Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
21 June 2024
Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
Reviews
Blu-ray Review: ‘In the Realm of the Senses’
★★★★☆ Claimed by many to be a film that blurs the boundaries between art and pornography, Nagisa Ôshima’s In the Realm of the Senses...
DVD Review: ‘Shiver’ (2008)
★★★★☆ If, like me, you felt modern horror movies had lost the plot, Shiver (2008) – a wonderfully stylish chiller from Spain – may...
DVD Review: ‘The Guardian’ (1990)
★★☆☆☆ No, this is not an in-depth look at the daily running of one of Britain’s top broadsheets, though that may have been more...
DVD Review: ‘The Devil’s Kiss’
★☆☆☆☆ You know those films which are so bad they’re good? Well, unfortunately The Devil’s Kiss (1975) isn’t one. This (apparent) ‘Euro-terror’ classic from...
DVD Review: ‘A Film with Me in It’
★★☆☆☆ Irish director Ian Fitzgibbon impressed us last year with Perrier’s Bounty (2009), a darkly funny crime thriller which drew inevitable but fair comparisons...
DVD Review: ‘This Boy’s Life’
★★★★☆ Starring Robert De Niro and a young Leonardo DiCaprio (in his first leading role), Michael Caton-Jones’ This Boy’s Life (1993) is the emotive tale...
DVD Review: ‘Stalker’ (2010)
★★☆☆☆ Spandeux Ballet star Martin Kemp’s debut feature Stalker (2010) (not to be confused with the 1979 Andrey Tarkovskiy film of the same name)...
