★★★★☆ The rise, fall and eventual rise again of James Lavelle, vinyl junkie turned trailblazing record label producer and creative figurehead of musical outfit UNKLE, may be an overly familiar tale of the young ingénue who succumbs to his own […]
★★★☆☆ Documentary filmmaker Niall McCann’s Lost in France is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for a group of mid-1990s bands and musicians borne from the influential Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground. Both an ode to the industrial Scottish city […]
★★★☆☆ All set to find an appreciative audience on BBC Four’s long-running Storyville strand, Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream (2015) – which premièred at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival – takes a pleasant and interesting trip […]
“I love Curb Your Enthusiasm. I want to feel just as entitled as any rich, middle aged white man; that’s how entitled I want my protagonist to be.” Desiree Akhaven does not consider herself to be a political filmmaker. In […]
★★★☆☆ Liv Corfixen’s My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2014) starts from the unfortunate position of being wide open to comparison with another behind-the-scenes peek, Eleanor Coppola’s Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). Where that film followed the […]
Ann Hui’s voice is an uncommon one in world cinema. Probably the most acclaimed of the Hong Kong New Wave directors, Hui began her career in the late 1970s in a film industry then dominated by kung fu movies. She […]
“Form seemed to have gone rigid.” Few sentences or sentiments could better encapsulate the climate in which Věra Chytilová, Queen of the Czech New Wave, forged her boundary-pushing directorial career – or the spunky attitude with which she approached her […]
With the release of her fourth feature film in 13 years Jessica Hausner continues the current flow of quietly antagonistic Austrian auteurs speaking truth against the powerful constructs of a bourgeois society that eats its own for sport and pleasure. […]
★★★★☆ Ti West is undoubtedly one of the most exciting directors of the American horror new wave. He works intuitively, re-thinking the rules of horror movies within established generic boundaries. While he may be known for his signature slow-burns, the […]
★★☆☆☆ Adèle Exarchopoulos’ return to Cannes following Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s Palme d’Or win might be the headline from Marianne Tardieu’s French thriller Insecure (2014), but the film itself sadly doesn’t reach the promise of what its star might […]
★★★★☆ A well-publicised spat involving its two lead actresses and their director may have taken some of the sheen off a remarkable Palme d’Or win at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) […]
★★★★☆ From the creative mind of Peter Strickland, the director behind 2009’s hugely promising Katlin Varga, comes the long-awaited Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Starring our very own Toby Jones amongst a host of all-Italian talent, Strickland’s Film4 FrightFest entry (having […]
