violence
The Informer review - tough but tin-eared B-movieThursday, 29 August 2019
If it wasn’t for bad luck, Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) wouldn’t have any luck at all. Being an Iraq special forces veteran jailed for protecting his wife in a bar fight seems wretched karma enough. Released as an undercover informant on the Polish... Read more... |
Inside the Secret World of Incels, BBC One review - involuntary celibacy, violence and despairThursday, 01 August 2019
A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Lords of ChaosWednesday, 17 July 2019
“All this evil and dark crap was supposed to be fun,” complains exasperated Norwegian black metal overlord Euronymous, played by Rory Culkin, as his world spirals out of control in a cataclysm of murder, suicide and church burnings. The true events... Read more... |
Dirty God review - an important piece of filmmakingSaturday, 08 June 2019
With the continued prevalence of acid attacks in the UK, it was only a matter of time before they became the subject of a film. Thank goodness, then, it's handled with such unflinching care as it is in Dirty God. Director and writer Sacha Polak... Read more... |
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum review - mayhem in ManhattanFriday, 17 May 2019
Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps... Read more... |
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile review - pedestrian Ted Bundy biopicSaturday, 04 May 2019
Why make a feature film about Ted Bundy, the notorious 1970s serial killer when you’ve already made Conversations with a Killer, a four-part factual series for Netflix about him? A charitable explanation would be that it offered documentarian Joe... Read more... |
Dragged Across Concrete review - Mel Gibson's hard-boiled highThursday, 18 April 2019
Mel Gibson’s vile drunken rants a decade ago, his 63 years and the price of both inform his role as cop Brett Ridgeman. Writer-director S. Craig Zahler won’t comment. But as Ridgeman and patrol partner Anthony (fellow Hollywood right-wing rarity... Read more... |
Minding the Gap review – profound musings on lifeFriday, 22 March 2019
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap.... Read more... |
Strike Back: Silent War, Sky 1 review - bullets, bodies, baddies and a stolen atom bombFriday, 01 March 2019
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The... Read more... |
Crackdown 3 review - spectacular super-powered action that was great fun many years agoThursday, 21 February 2019
Did you play videogames back in 2010? If you did, there’s a reasonable chance you played Crackdown 2. Only a reasonable chance as the game was just on Xbox 360 – this was back in the days when there was a lot more console-exclusive titles. But if... Read more... |
A Private War review - Rosamund Pike burns with passion in well-meaning biopicSaturday, 16 February 2019
The Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin lived such a fearless life that it's a shame this celluloid biopic isn't correspondingly brave. Sincere to a fault and bolstered by a blazing performance from an impassioned Rosamund Pike, Matthew... Read more... |
Beast on the Moon, Finborough Theatre review - drama of familial displacement packs a quiet punchWednesday, 06 February 2019
In the history of early photography in the Middle East, it was the Armenian Christian traders and their descendents who became the pioneers of the new technology. Their numbers include the Armenian-Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler, "the Eye of... Read more... |
