See cinema differently
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"
Director: Robert Eggers Stars: Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang The cinema of Robert Eggers is hard and earthen. An arena of of myth and madness fashioned from wood, stone and mud. Three for three he has brought us visions of the past cloaked in moods of dark mysticism entwined with the most exacting period …
Director: Paul Verhoeven Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Virginie Efira, Louise Chevillotte There are notable collisions within Paul Verhoeven's inevitably scandalous Benedetta. In the spirit of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walerian Borowczyk and a veritable army of others, Verhoeven resurrects the beleaguered spirit of the '70s Euro nunsploitation picture. The sacred and profane assault one another. But there are …
Director: Sebastian Meise Stars: Franz Rogowski, Georg Friedrich, Anton von Lucke The box. The hole. Movies and TV have given us many iterations of the darkest depths of solitary confinement in prisons, from Andy Dufresne blinking up into the warden's callous eyes in The Shawshank Redemption to the salacious torture chamber shared by Pam Grier …
What's your favourite needle drop in a movie? For me, of late, I've been thinking on the anachronous use of The Moody Blues' love paean 'Nights in White Satin' which appears midway through Bertrand Bonello's laconic chamber piece House of Tolerance from 2011. A crepuscular viewing experience, House of Tolerance charts the encounters, routines and malaise occurring …
Continue reading "Minutiae: The Moody Blues in House of Tolerance"
Director: Lauren Hadaway Stars: Isabelle Fuhrman, Dilano, Jonathan Cherry Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman) is in a hurry. A freshman at university with more than a touch of competitiveness about her, she joins the campus' novice rowing team at the start of the school year and quickly falls into a pattern of increasingly intense and obsessive …
Director: Judd Apatow Stars: Karen Gillan, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal Judd Apatow became known for a string of affable, overlong but justifiably loved comedies, but that's all over now. In one fell swoop we're invited to watch as his credibility is visibly eroded. Running a little over two hours and missing even a single grace …
Director: Richard Linklater Stars: Glen Powell, Jack Black, Milo Coy Folding in his combined interests in nostalgia, coming-of-age tales and the passage of time, Richard Linklater's latest deployment of rotoscope technology arrives on Netflix as a winsome blue-skied What If. His previous film outings that have utilised rotoscoping - Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly - used …
Continue reading "Review: Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood"
The Lost Highway Hotel 