★★★★★ William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by […]
★★★☆☆ Are hopes and expectations dashed or raised by a film called Nurse (2013) starring Paz de la Huerta? It doesn’t suggest a classic, more a titillating horror comedy. Therefore, the whole endeavour edges close to the perilous shores of […]
★★☆☆☆ If man is five and the devil six, then Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Scott Derrickson’s religious-themed supernatural drama, Deliver Us fom Evil (2014), takes place in a city of endless rain and tenebrous shadows occasionally disturbed by the diamond-dazzle of […]
★★★★☆ 1960 was a landmark year for scary movies. Among pioneering offerings by Bava, Franju, Hitchcock and Powell was Roger Corman and The Fall of the House of Usher – the first entry in what became known as the ‘Poe Cycle’. Like horror’s […]
★★★★☆ In July Jung’s impressive directorial debut, produced by critically acclaimed film-maker Lee Chang-dong, a city cop relocated to the sticks befriends a moppet with a crummy home life. Starring Bae Doo-na and Kim Sae-ron, A Girl at My Door […]
★★★★★ Lars von Trier’s masterpiece is almost twenty. Starring Emily Watson, in what surely ranks as one of the most remarkable big screen debuts, Breaking the Waves (1996), like most classics, appears to have imprinted into its fabric an essential […]
