Director: Nicolas Pesce Stars: Mia Wasikowska, Christopher Abbott, Laia Costa I remember reading Ryu Murakami's Audition in the hopes of decoding some of the more surreal occurences in Takashi Miike's masterful adaptation and being struck by the direct voice apparent in the translation. Favouring this, I also read Piercing; a novella that similarly popped off the page, and … Continue reading Review: Piercing
Maps To The Stars seems to cement David Cronenberg moving into a new third phase in his career. Having made a name for himself in the 70's and 80's with provocative and perverse body horror pictures, his output since has been almost entirely literary, adapting disparate or 'unfilmable' source materials (his last self-written film was 1999's eXistenZ). … Continue reading Review: Maps To The Stars
Influence hangs heavy in the air in Richard Aoyade's darkly comic second feature The Double. An adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novella, it tells the tale of one man, Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), who feels invisible within a hermetically sealed world. He is but a gear in a great, ungainly machine, a cipher within a bureaucracy that is fast … Continue reading Review: The Double
With the possible exception of Harmony Korine, Jim Jarmusch is about as hipster as American independent cinema gets. It's a shame that this carries such a negative connotation, as the man has made some great films over his career, yet they have remained doggedly under the radar. Even his breakout 'hits' (Dead Man, Ghost Dog: … Continue reading Review: Only Lovers Left Alive
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 predict, and when it doesn't work it really doesn't work. Takashi … Continue reading Review: Stoker
***originally written 9 March 2010*** Confession time. I've never read any Lewis Carroll, and if I've seen any previous version of Alice In Wonderland in full then it was a very long time ago. However so many of it's characters, storylines and phrases are part of the cultural zeitgeist, that, like The Wizard of Oz, … Continue reading Review: Alice In Wonderland
