Film Reviews
The CongressWednesday, 13 August 2014
Director Ari Folman burst onto the scene with his brilliantly realised, quasi-autobiographical Waltz With Bashir, an animated feature that navigated between dreamscapes and reality to explore the personal trauma arising from witnessing the massacres at Lebanon’s Shabra and Shatila refugee camps as an Israeli soldier. His follow-up feature, The Congress, is highly original and fizzing with ideas. Read more... |
Expendables IIITuesday, 12 August 2014
There was a brief moment back in the day when Sylvester Stallone thought he ought to be a serious actor (remember Cop Land?), but posterity will surely recall him as the King of the Franchise. As if Rocky and Rambo weren't enough, the 68-year-old Stallone is now enjoying a major string of paydays with The Expendables, and this third instalment will merely whet the global appetite for more. Read more... |
We Gotta Get Out of This PlaceMonday, 11 August 2014
"There are 32 ways to write a story...but there is only one plot - things are not as they seem" - wisdom, courtesy of author Jim Thompson and ominously quoted in We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Sue (Mackenzie Davis) before she's swept into a nightmarish story of her own, one that takes the shape of a Thompson-esque crime thriller where things, and more specifically people, are most certainly contrary to how they appear. Read more... |
The Inbetweeners 2Friday, 08 August 2014
It comes as no surprise that this sequel, based on the Channel 4 TV series of the same name, which saw four awkward male teenagers bond over their insecurities, offers little more than a shitstorm of juvenile humour and one-note female characters who are presented as objects to lust over. Read more... |
LiltingThursday, 07 August 2014
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. Read more... |
God's PocketWednesday, 06 August 2014
Now that the shock and dismay over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death has subsided, we have the chance to see his final performances and recall an actor like few others. I can’t think of many who managed to emit so much power and convey so much human complexity without an iota of visible “acting”. Read more... |
Welcome to New YorkTuesday, 05 August 2014
Depardieu as an imaginary version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was always likely to be a study in grossness. Add director and co-writer Abel Ferrara, the hardcore extremist behind Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, and a white-knuckle night out is guaranteed. Depardieu’s powerful French banker Devereaux is a creature of grotesque and relentless appetites, alright, a bloated sex addict and rapist. Read more... |
WakoldaMonday, 04 August 2014
Against the background of the spectacular scenery of Patagonia, Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo creates a tight, subtly unnerving thriller in her third film Wakolda. Its American release title “The German Doctor” reveals its subject more immediately, which is the time spent by Nazi physician Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl) in Latin America after his flight from Europe. Read more... |
A PromiseFriday, 01 August 2014
The long march of history pales next to the clamped-down passions and pulpy theatrics of A Promise, the first English-language film from that often most sinuous and witty of French directors, Patrice Leconte. Wit, alas, is nowhere to be seen on this occasion, which may just mark the worst foray into non-native celluloid territory since The Lives of Others' Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gave us The Tourist four years ago. Read more... |
Guardians of the GalaxyThursday, 31 July 2014
Marvel takes a risk with the origins story of an eclectic crew of potty-mouthed thieves and criminals based on a little known comic book series, and it pays off thanks to Nicole Perlman’s and James Gunn’s confident script which follows the superhero formula yet sprinkles it with a charming off-kilter quality. Read more... |
Mood IndigoWednesday, 30 July 2014
The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath. Read more... |
Hide Your Smiling FacesMonday, 28 July 2014
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it. Read more... |
Who Is Dayani Cristal?Friday, 25 July 2014
The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about teenagers who set out on that difficult route, Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows us a similar experience, though through a somewhat different lens. Read more... |
The Lady from ShanghaiThursday, 24 July 2014
There’s so much high drama and scandal surrounding the production of Orson Welles’ feverish cruise through the dark side of human nature it’s no surprise the resulting film is a bizarre labyrinthine of twists and tightly strung lunacy. Welles’s exorcism of personal and professional demons in this impassioned and witty tale of moral bankruptcy remains as compelling and confounding today as it was back in 1948. Read more... |
HerculesWednesday, 23 July 2014
A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend. Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules… Read more... |
The Purge: AnarchyWednesday, 23 July 2014
The Purge is the night each year when the US government turns off the law and lets mayhem rule, allowing crimes including murder and rape. Just let it all out of your system, citizens, goes the official logic, and crime on the other 364 days will plummet. Read more... |
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