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Film Review: Orphée
★★★★★ Deploying the Greek myth of Orpheus in a contemporary setting, mimicked nine years later by Marcel Camus in Black Orpheus, Jean Cocteau’s bewitching touch shines bright in Orphée. Restoring this eternal tale of love to the big screen, this new 2K restoration released by the BFI gives the film an elevated platform for reappraisal. Cocteau’s…
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Film Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
★★★★★ Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old uses the latest in digital effects, 3D, frame-rate tinkering and colouration to take audiences back to the Great War 1914-1918, showing us what life was really like in the trenches. The resulting documentary is ground-breaking, poignant and eerie. Made to mark the end of the First World…
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Film Review: Outlaw King
★★★★☆ Following up his 2016 western Hell or High Water, director David Mackenzie takes us back to medieval Scotland with Outlaw King, a bloody, visceral and rousing interpretation of Robert the Bruce’s rebellion against English tyranny. In his second collaboration with Mackenzie, Chris Pine impresses mightily with his turn as the man who would be King of…
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#LFF 2018: All the Gods in the Sky review
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in the Sky. From its opening shots of a factory floor manufacturing sheet metal and the…
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DVD Review: Salvador
★★★☆☆ Based on the devastating Salvadoran civil war of 1980-1992, and told from the perspective of American photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods), Oliver Stone’s third film lacks the polish of his later work, but is no less excoriating in its condemnation of the US’s support for brutal regimes ‘friendly’ to American interests. Boyle is not…
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DVD Review: Night of the Creeps
★★★★☆ Fred Dekker’s 1986 Night of the Creeps begins as it means to go on, opening with a frantic chase through the corridors of a spaceship populated with ludicrously rotund aliens, crashing into the monochrome of 1950s small town USA, before propelling us forward in time to the garish purple of the 1980s. In its irreverent…
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Film Review: Sorry to Bother You
★★★☆☆ Ambitious. Witty. Original. Surreal. Ridiculous. These all describe writer Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry To Bother You, and yet none of them quite encapsulate how innovative and genre-defying it is. It’s a screwball comedy, it’s absurdist sci-fi, it’s a satire on capitalism, and yet it also manages to be a political call-to-arms; a film…
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Film Review: Bad Times at the El Royale
★★★☆☆ Drew Goddard’s directorial debut The Cabin in the Woods was a playful deconstruction of the horror genre, housing a narrative yarn that continues to unspool toward its finale. Goddard’s latest offering has a similar narrative expansion to Cabin, but less of its playful tonalities. Bad Times at the El Royale is a hard-boiled page-turner,…
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#LFF 2018: The Nightshifter review
★★★☆☆ In Dennison Ramalho’s phantasmagorical morality tale The Nightshifter, a cuckolded coroner’s assistant with the ability to communicate with the recently departed takes revenge against his wife and her lover, in turn unleashing a living nightmare upon himself and his two kids. Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) is an absent father and husband. In early scenes,…
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Film Review: Been So Long
★★★★★ Tinge Krishnan’s Been So Long is a musical delight of heart-warming songs, sardonic British humour, and fantastic performances. Set in London’s Camden Town, its usual grittiness glossed over with a romantic, Technicolor lens, the story avoids posturing with the usual tropes of inner-city life, and instead offers its characters hope. This London may be punctuated…
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