Incoming – Gary Numan: Android in La La Land
At the end of the 1970s a nervy young musician topped the music charts. He quickly became one of the most famous men on the planet. Three decades of groundbreaking and hugely influential music would follow. Then six long years of silence, until now. Gary Numan: Android in La La Land is out in cinemas …
Incoming: Julieta
Julieta is a teacher of fifty five. She writes a long letter to her daughter, Antía, trying to explain all the things she has kept secret from her over the last 30 years. When she has finished her confession, she doesn’t know where to post the letter. Her daughter abandoned her when she was eighteen …
Film Review: Indigo Children
Anyone who has ever had the dubious pleasure of watching an overly arty and try-hard low budget independent film knows there are few worse experiences at the cinema. Too many young directors leave film school with the inherent belief that they have a unique vision but end up making jaded copies of the films they …
Incoming: Cosmos
Witold has just failed his law exams, and Fuchs has recently quit his job at a Parisian fashion label. Both are going to spend a few days in the countryside, and choose to stay at a so-called family inn. They are welcomed by a sparrow, hanged in the forest by a string. Then, an equally …
DVD Review: The Bloodstained Butterfly
Giallo, as a genre, doesn’t have the best reputation for producing films that are either coherent or make a great amount of sense. Much of the dialogue would normally make Jordan’s publisher blush, and whilst there’s usually a strong seam of style running through them, the plots are often largely nonsensical. Duccio Tessari’s The Bloodstained …
Film Review: Cosmos
Mainstream, unoriginal and tired, not three words you could ever use in relation to the films of Andrzej Zulwaski. The Polish director has been confounding, confusing and surprising since his first film, The Third Part of the Night, back in 1971. By far and away his most well-known film is Possession, which stars Isabelle Adjani. …
Incoming: Black
Mavela, 15 years old, is a Black Bronx member. She falls madly in love with Marwan, an extremely charismatic member of a rival gang, the 1080s. The young couple is forced to make a brutal choice between gang loyalty and the love they have for one another. An impossible dilemma. Black is out in cinemas …
DVD Review: Sweet Bean (Masters of Cinema)
We live in an ageing society, and as the EU referendum demonstrated, you ignore the grey vote at your peril. However, the way societies treat their elderly differs around the world. The same can be said for those with traditionally infectious diseases and disabilities. In Naomi Kawase’s latest film, Sweet Bean, she takes a meditative …
Film Review: Almost Holy
Matters of right and wrong in terms of ethics and morality are, by and large, fairly black and white in the Western world. The same cannot be said in Eastern Europe today. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and civil war in the former Yugoslavia has created a whole raft of social and economic problems. …
DVD Review: The Shop on the High Street
Voted as one of the greatest works of Czechoslovakian cinema by critics at the end of the last century, The Shop on the High Street was one of the first films to tackle the Holocaust. Directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, the Slovakian film covers an area of World War II history not widely …