Film reviews and more
There are many things that the United Arab Emirates is famous for. Recent financial meltdown aside, the UAE is home to the world’s tallest building, gargantuan man-made islands and many a finely-tuned supercar. But few have pegged the UAE as […]
★★★☆☆ Based on the influential novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by visionary writer Oscar Wilde, Oliver Parker’s take on the Gothic classic interestingly focuses on the idea of celebrity rather than the generic horror you would expect. If you anticipate […]
★★★★☆ There are films you love, films you hate and films that, quite frankly, leave you more perplexed than George W. Bush with a bumper book of Sudoku. Kakera – A Piece of Our Life (2009) is likely to fall […]
★☆☆☆☆ With 2012 (2009), director Roland Emmerich appears to have finally defeated his own selling-point. The idea of a high-concept disaster movie has been ignored. There is no clear, marketable threat here as in his previous films, having demonised the weather in […]
★★★☆☆ The most unexpected pleasure of watching Richard Kelly’s The Box (2009) is the realisation that it is (in essence) a Christmas film, distilling the dread, panic and encompassing consumerism associated with the festive period, whilst presented in the form […]
★★★★☆ 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.
