See cinema differently
First of all, I'd like to make it clear that this isn't a rant about snobbish intellectual cinema versus eye-popping Hollywood action movies. That's a tired and largely ridiculous argument, something akin to saying that one type of cheese is better than a particular flavoured milk. To do that would also be hypocritical. I have …
Continue reading "Pretty Vacancy: Why I’m Not Watching Iron Man 3"
Director: Park Chan-Wook Stars: Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode When a successful and respected director from the world cinema stage makes their debut on US soil there's usually a justifiable sense of unease. Are they selling out? Sanitising themselves? And if not, will the sensibilities of one culture translate into, ahem, American. It's tough to …
Directors: Various Stars: Multiple Like an episode of Sesame Street being broadcast from hell, The ABCs Of Death presents 26 shorts by 26 different directors each of whom illustrate a different way to die based around the letter of the alphabet selected. The people called upon span the globe with talents working in both live action and animation. …
Director: Pedro Almodóvar Stars: Carlos Areces, Hugo Silva, Cecilia Roth If your experience of Pedro Almodóvar is limited to his most recent features - 2009's noir melodrama Broken Embraces and 2011's superb thriller The Skin I Live In - then his new film I'm So Excited! may take you a little by surprise. He may have traded …
Director: Joseph Kosinski Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko An imagined conversation between Tom Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski soon after the release of Tron Legacy: Joseph: Hey, Tom! How's it going? Tom: Sorry... who are you? Joseph: I'm Joseph Kosinski. I directed that fuck-awful Tron reboot that just came out. Made a sweet shitload of …
Director: Derek Cianfrance Stars: Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ryan Gosling "If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder". So says gangly mechanic Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) to his small-time crime protege Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling). Glanton is a drifter and sometime-carnie who has previously eked out a living as a motorcycle stunt driver. Arriving …
Director: Carlos Raygadas Stars: Rutt Reygadas, Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Nathalia Acevedo Post Tenebras Lux (meaning 'light after darkness') is a film so far removed from the conventions of narrative cinema that building a review of it requires a whole different set of parameters. A new lexicon is required. How do you talk about pacing in …
Director: Rodney Ascher The Shining is one of my all-time favourite movies. I'd put it in my top 5. I love watching it and have lost count of the number of times I've seen it. Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to see it on a cinema screen, on Halloween no less. I jumped …
Directors: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani Caesar Must Die (or to give it its native moniker Cesare deve morire) is an Italian documentary drama set inside a maximum security prison in which a group of convicted felons stage a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and is nearly completely shot in black and white. That sentence alone has …
The Lost Highway Hotel 