Film Review: The Tsugua Diaries
The first scene of a film sets the tone. Brings the audience into the director’s vision and gives a taste of what is yet to come. A memorable opening sequence can be so important. The beginning of Ben Sharrock’s Limbo or Oleh Sentsov’s Rhino are great recent examples of how you can introduce your characters …
Blu-Ray Review: Double Indemnity
It’s the oldest trick in the book. Beautiful young woman marries a rich older man, persuades him to take out a life insurance policy and soon after he, coincidentally, has a nasty accident. Even better if she can find some patsy to do the deed for her, using her feminine wiles to keep him on …
Film Review: 18 1/2
Watergate was, until recently at least, probably the biggest political scandal to rock the United States of America since World War II. It started with a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C, followed by two years of denials and culminated in the release of a ‘smoking-gun’ tape which led to the …
Film Review: Between Two Worlds
The gig economy is one of the biggest blights of modern capitalism. Not only do workers have no job security, the pay is usually terrible and the work is rarely much better. All the power rests in the hands of the employers while employees can get fired at will. Without any guarantee of hours, and …
Film Review: Luzzu
We humans are hunter gatherers who have relied on the land and the sea for sustenance and much more dating back to the first days of man. Today, most of our food needs is catered for by mass production. Huge, often inhumane, industrialised farming practices and commercial fishing. Families who have fished the same waters …
Blu-Ray Review: Vampyr
Today’s modern horror films, especially those which make it into multiplexes, tend to be full of flashy effects and polished to within an inch of their lives. Often featuring a score that is so obtrusive you’ll possibly want to tear your head off. It hasn’t always been this way and much of the output coming …
Film Review – The Quest: Nepal
Human beings seem hopelessly obsessed by challenges. To pit ourselves against whatever nature has to throw at us. To navigate the uncharted seas, scale the most difficult routes on treacherous peaks. Mount Everest has been a beacon for adventurers since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the first successful accent of the summit in 1953. …
Film Review: Image of Victory
After World War II and the end of the British Mandate, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was meant to be a fresh start for a region which had a deep history of turmoil. This brave new world of the territory being split between Jews and Arabs was destined to fail before it even …
Film Review: The Innocents
Childhood is usually depicted on screen as being some kind of wonderful utopian period or time of great unhappiness and danger. The reality is usually somewhere in the middle, a lot of good but also a lot of bad. A time when young adventurous minds crave knowledge and new experiences, but these normally come in …
Film Review: Rhino
Is anyone born evil? The debate around nurture versus nature will likely rumble on in perpetuity, but the environment in which someone grows up plays a huge role in deciding the person they become. That is both in terms of homelife and the society in which the formative years are spent. One bad choice can …