Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ In the middle of the endless steppes of the Kazakhstan expanses, Wild Field (Dikoe pole, 2008) protagonist Mitya (Oleg Dolin) runs a one-man medical centre. Life is hard and the steppe vast and empty, dwarfing the sparse population of […]
The Cannes Film Festival needs little introduction. Even if the proposed news agency boycott of the 2010 festival goes ahead, it will do little to stifle the inevitable media frenzy that waits to descend. This year’s event will play host to the latest work from some of cinema’s greatest auteurs including Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard and Mike Leigh.
★★★☆☆ There’s been a lot said about Cemetery Junction (2010), the first cinematic release co-written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, mostly (and to the film’s detriment) by Gervais himself.
★★★☆☆ The opening scene of Whip It (2010) introduces Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page) preparing for a beauty pageant by dying her hair blue, much to her mother’s (Marcia Gay Harden) horror when Bliss later steps up onto the podium.
★★★☆☆ I’m a massive fan of Noel Fielding (the androgynous thirty-something who appears to have taken bountiful comic influence from Spike Milligan and the Monty Python assemblage, and regularly pays fashion homage to the likes of David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Gary Numan).
To pin-point the exact origins of British social realism is almost an impossible task, as the whole movement emerged from a combination of Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and the British ‘Angry Young Men’ (even this is an extremely condensed and over-simplified explanation).
★★★☆☆ Whether you love him or hate him, it would be impossible to argue against the fact that French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of the acclaimed Amelie [2001]) possesses the incredible ability to take the surreal and create something almost plausible.
