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#LFF 2018: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead review
★★★★☆ Down Terrace director Ben Wheatley returns to the horror of kinship with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (working title Colin You Anus), which received its world premiere at this year’s London Film Festival. The film stars Wheatley regular Neil Maskell – in a career-best performance – as the titular Colin/anus, an unremarkable everyman desperate to unite…
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Film Review: Mandy
★★★★★ Mandy is only the second feature film from director Panos Cosmatos, but every moment of it pulses with a deranged lysergic energy that announces the arrival of a great individualist talent. Prolific is not – just yet, anyway – a word you can associate with the Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos. His debut feature film…
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Unmasking cinema’s greatest horror icons
There have been some truly memorable scary movie stars over the years, with many of them being the centre of attention at Halloween, wearing masks or some sort of headwear to make their character even more unnerving. These types of films may not be everyone’s cup of tea, as some may desire something a bit…
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Film Review: First Man
★★★★☆ Hot from the success of 2016’s La La Land, Damien Chazelle returns with First Man, his personal take on the long and arduous road to getting a man on the moon. We all know how this story ends, but in this fable of astronomic ambition it’s about the journey, not the destination. Despite previously…
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Film Review: Eighth Grade
★★★★☆ Every excruciating intricacy of teenage girlhood is held up to the light in Bo Burnham’s outstanding debut film Eighth Grade. Following Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the film chronicles her journey through her last week of middle school and preparation for life as a high-schooler. When Cecilia Lisbon memorably remarks to her doctor in Sofia Coppola’s The…
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Criterion Review: My Man Godfrey
★★★★☆ One may not consider the Great Depression as particularly fertile ground for comedy, but contemporary Hollywood would beg to differ. Chaplin built his reputation of finding the poignant humour in poverty, and many screwball comedies of the sound era invariably touched on the Depression, none more so than Gregory La Cava’s 1936 My Man Godfrey.…
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Criterion Review: Cold Water
★★★★☆ Olivier Assayas’ 1994 film Cold Water is just that – a sharp splash of punk cinema, adolescent romance and surrealist imagery, all set to period rock music of the 1970s. Equal parts arthouse cinema and coming-of-age drama, the influence of his tribute to teen rebellion remains deeply felt. In 1970s France, Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles…
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Film Review: Female Human Animal
★★★☆☆ Shot on analogue video, Josh Appignanesi’s Female Human Animal is a visually arresting, surrealist piece whose reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, but which is never less than intriguing. Chloe (Chloe Aridjis) is a writer and fine art curator, currently supervising an exhibition of the surrealist painter Leona Carrington. At home, she lives a solitary life with…
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2018 Filmfest Hamburg round-up
This year’s Filmfest Hamburg coincided with the city’s football derby. A fiercely contested match between the city’s two biggest clubs, the game was a fitting metaphor for a festival undergoing its own identity crisis. CineVue were in attendance, and we’ve run-down our five favourite films at the festival. It’s been seven years since the last…
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Film Review: Venom
★★☆☆☆ Intended as the first film in Sony Pictures’ wider Marvel Universe, the Tom Hardy-starring Venom is a desperately confused piece of work which has only a few compensatory pleasures to offer along the way. Not wishing to dish out another identikit offering of lycra-clad good guys and maniacal bad guys, Sony have taken a…
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