independent cinema
Down by LawSunday, 14 September 2014
Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law is back in British cinemas 28 years after it joined Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in galvanising the embryonic American indie movement.The original catalyst was Jarmusch's Stranger... Read more... |
Manuscripts Don't BurnWednesday, 10 September 2014
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?Rasoulof has had plenty of problems with the regime in his native country over the years... Read more... |
DVD: Blue RuinTuesday, 02 September 2014
Blue Ruin, the American thriller which won the coveted FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year, will amaze. It stars actors you don’t know, made by a director you don’t know yet Blue Ruin is proof of life beyond Hollywood: this is a tremendous... Read more... |
DVD: Starred UpTuesday, 12 August 2014
Director David Mackenzie tells us in this disc’s extras that Starred Up is his first genre film, and Fox’s low-rent sleeve art suggests that this could be another dreary, thuggish Britflick. The prison drama clichés come thick and fast, from the... 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... 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... 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... 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... 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... 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... Read more... |
DVD: ExhibitionTuesday, 17 June 2014
With Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010), the filmmaker Joanna Hogg staked out unfashionable territory: the anxieties and frustrations that stem from communication failures and deep-seated resentments among the insular English bourgeoisie.... Read more... |
DVD: Birds, Orphans and FoolsThursday, 12 June 2014
What an astonishing rediscovery Juraj Jakubisko’s Birds, Orphans and Fools is! The 1969 Slovak film stans both outside history, and yet firmly within the context of its time, the year after Soviet troops quelled the Prague Spring. But its dating is... Read more... |
