See cinema differently
Director: Gaspar Noé Stars: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz As highlighted by Mark Cousins in his labyrinthine The Story of Film, Michael Haneke's 2000 film Code Unknown is made up of a series of long takes that never touch. Where traditional editing techniques juxtapose scenes directly to engender a sense of natural flow, Haneke divides …
Director: Terence Davies Stars: Jack Lowden, Matthew Tennyson, Tom Blyth The musings of WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon seem to have inspired a sense of visual poetry in British stalwart Terence Davies, whose stately biopic turns in some gratifying surprises in it's early sections. Disinclined to present the harrowing warfare of the Somme as anything approaching …
Director: Eskil Vogt Stars: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim Childless, happily single and cresting toward the big four-oh, I don't mind admitting one of the lasting taboos of modern society; I'm not a great fan of kids. While my friends have partnered up and started reproducing - and happy I …
Director: Chris Sivertson Stars: Christina Ricci, Colleen Camp, Santino Barnard Fleeing from an evidently abusive husband with her son Cody (Santino Barnard), pretty-'50s housewife Laura (Christina Ricci) takes up residence in a spacious farmhouse out in the rolling hills of California. While Cody struggles making friends at his new school, Laura starts to feel relatively …
Director: Keith Thomas Stars: Zac Efron, Gloria Reuben, Ryan Kiera Armstrong Stephen King's Firestarter sits somewhere unassuming toward the bottom of the mid-tier of his work, and the same could be said for it's 1984 adaptation starring a young Drew Barrymore. By this yardstick the call for this remake seems relatively minor, yet here it is. …
Year: 1998 Director: John McNaughton Stars: Denise Richards, Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon It'd be easy to besmirch the latter day career of Denise Richards, whose reality TV persona often feels like a warped mirror image of the kinds of roles she was nabbing in her late '90s heyday. But while she's never been the greatest …
Directors: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan Stars: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis Scheinert and Kwan - collectively 'Daniels' - garnered attention a few years ago with their wantonly strange and anarchic Daniel Radcliffe-is-a-corpse-with-a-boner movie Swiss Army Man; the absurdity of the project gathering the most comment. Still, this oddball calling card showed enough …
Continue reading "Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once"
Director: Laura Wandel Stars: Maya Vanderbeque, Günter Duret, Laura Verlinden School years are immensely formative in the development of the individual, and not just for the lessoned learned in the classroom. These monitored spaces are also arenas in which we learn social queues, hierarchies and boundaries. Laura Wandel's intimately-shot Playground intrudes into these spaces with sometimes …
Director: Peter Brunner Stars: Franz Rogowski, Susanne Jensen, Monika Hinterhuber Anyone with a even a cursory eye on European cinema at present will have some understanding of what an incendiary presence Franz Rogowski has become over the past few years, with great work evidenced in collaboration with Christian Petzold (twice now) and Sebastian Meise, among …
Director: Audrey Diwan Stars: Anamaria Vartolomei, Luàna Bajrami, Fabrizio Rongione In Audrey Diwan's essential drama Happening (a.k.a. L'Événement), it's protagonist's world is the centre of everything. The fulcrum of every scene. Diwan uses handheld camerawork and deep focus to keep us within the realms of Anne's (Anamaria Vartolomei) persistent mind. Whenever she's at her most …
Director: Jane Schoenbrun Stars: Anna Cobb, Michael J Rogers, May Leitz Like many of it's potential viewers, I suspect, I watched We're All Going to the World's Fair on a laptop. Such is often the fate of indie horror pictures scaled as Jane Schoenbrun's is. And such has been the nature of the past two …
Continue reading "Review: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair"
Director: Mickey Reece Stars: Molly C. Quinn, Jake Horowitz, Ben Hall ***Warning, this review contains spoilers, and I would recommend viewing the film with as little foreknowledge as possible*** Sick of the tropes and predictability of cheapo exorcism flicks? So is Mickey Reece. One of the rising stars of the American indie scene, Reece has …
Director: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović Stars: Gracija Filipović, Danica Curcic, Cliff Curtis Rarely straying from the iridescent seas that lap at the rocky coastline, the feature debut of Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović charts two days in the life of Julija (Gracija Filipović), a teenage girl whose life accompanying her fisherman father Ante (Leon Lucev) has …
Director: Tom Gormican Stars: Nicolas Cage, Tiffany Haddish, Pedro Pascal There's a bit early on in Adaptation. in which addled screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) stresses how much he wants to avoid the pitfalls of the cliché Hollywood thriller. "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know... or characters, …
Continue reading "Review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"
I thought I'd keep something I could update on a semi-regular basis on here, showing my favourite films from each calendar year, separated by year of production (differing from my end-of-year lists, which favour UK release). I'm going back as far as 1940 for now, largely because the number of films per year that I've …
Continue reading "List: Top 10 Films Of Every Year, By Year Of Production"
The Lost Highway Hotel 