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Film Review: Winter’s Bone
★★★★☆ Hands up who knows what the Ozark Mountains look like? Well, you won’t soon forget after watching this bleak thriller. Winter’s Bone (2010) is the hot tip for awards success this year, and it’s not hard to see why: you haven’t seen a landscape so unwelcoming since No Country for Old Men (2007) or The Road (2009). Oh yes,…
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Film Review: ‘The Horde’
★★☆☆☆ After a number of years of low grade obscurity, the mid-2000s saw somewhat of a resurgent return to form for zombie-kind, thanks in no small part to the rage infected, sprinting killing machines of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and Spaced co-creator Edgar Wright’s rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004). Nearly every conceivable…
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Special Feature: The fluidity of identity in British cinema
With an industry so frequently considered as ‘lagging behind’ the successes of the mainstream provided by Hollywood, British Cinema seems somewhat subjugated by its dominant overseas counterpart. Furthermore, the artistic ‘otherness’ of a European cinema arguably fills the void in terms of an alternative to the mainstream blockbusters produced by Hollywood and its associates. The…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Delicatessen’
★★★☆☆ Released for the first time on Blu-ray as part of the StudioCanal Collection comes Delicatessen (1991), Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s surreal, post-apocalyptic rom-com about the cannibalistic tenants of an apartment block run by a sadistic butcher, set against the backdrop of a dystopian battle between those who eat meat and those who stick…
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DVD Releases: ‘Breathless: 50th Anniversary Special Edition’
Fifty years ago, if cinemagoers had been told that a group of young French writers at the Cahiers du Cinema were going to try their hand at filmmaking and change cinema forever, few would have believed it. Yet, half a century on sees the fiftieth anniversary DVD rerelease of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece (and yes, it really does…
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DVD Releases: ‘Date Night’
Date Night (2010), starring US comedy heavy weights Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Steve Carell (The American Office), is the latest comic offering from Night at the Museum (2006) director Shawn Levy. Taking a break from the ‘family-fun’ franchise Levy takes the helm on this comedy of errors (or rather of mistaken identity) set in New York City.…
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Portobello Film Festival 2010: Roundup
The Portobello Film Festival celebrates its 15th birthday in style this year with its two-and-a-half-week run between 2nd and 19th September. Promising to screen over 600 new films, Portobello makes use of various screening facilities it has at its disposal. Screening classics such as George Lucas’ The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in the Westbourne Studios…
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Theatrical Releases: ‘The Last Exorcism’
Those who’ve heard of The Last Exorcism (2010) will know that the most well-established name attached to it is that of Eli Roth, the once highly-promising writer/director of gory horror Cabin Fever (2002), who has since failed to produce anything of real worth (save, perhaps, for the Thanksgiving mock-trailer for the Tarantino/Rodriguez team up, Grindhouse).…
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Film Review: ‘Tamara Drewe’
★★☆☆☆ Your opinion towards the 19th century novelist and poet Thomas Hardy will, more likely than not, largely determine your reaction to Brit director Stephen Frears’ latest film, Tamara Drewe (2010). For some, Hardy was one of the greatest literary figures of all time, producing classic texts, including The Return of the Native and Jude…
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Theatrical Releases: ‘The Leopard’
If you were to draw up a list of influential mid 20th century foreign film makers the likes of Fredrico Fellini, Jean-Luc Goddard, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa would almost certainly appear, but Luchino Visconti seems to have slipped from the radar and it’s high time he got the reckoning he so richly deserves. Over…
EIFF 2026