FIlm Review
Film Review: Another Mother’s Son
In Christopher Menaul‘s period drama, Louisa [Jenny Seagrove], is a shopkeeper making the best of things on Nazi-occupied Jersey. Around her, boys in flat caps tear around the beautiful countryside on bicycles, Nazis parade in their pomp, and the stage looks set for a cosy, Sunday tea time film about plucky Brits surviving against the …
Film Review: Tickling Giants
There’s been a lot of coverage on screen about the Arab Spring, especially relating to Tunisia and Egypt, but little focus on the impact on the media in those countries. Probably because just about every network is in thrall to the authorities, so it’s a difficult angle to pursue. However, documentary filmmaker Sara Taksler struck …
Film Review: The Eyes of My Mother
Nurture versus nature is a ripe topic for plunder in genre cinema. Are some people born evil or are they just a product of the world around them? In Nicolas Pesce’s feature debut, The Eyes of My Mother, we are faced with the central protagonist of Francisca (beautifully played by Kika Magalhaes). As we view …
Film Review: All This Panic
Let’s be honest, I knew nothing about teenage girls when I was a teen, let alone now. The moral panic around their sexualisation, drug use, underage drinking and ‘relentless’ sex seems to all come from a snobbish older generational view. There’s next to no coverage, either in films or on TV, of what teenagers actually …
Film Review: The Olive Tree
Socially critical films fare best in times of economic strive and when the political right and nationalism are on the rise. We’re in the midst of one such period and now starting to see a rise in reactionary cinema. The most prominent film-makers currently doing this kind of work are the Dardenne Brothers in Belgium …
Film Review: Gleason
As anyone who has spent five days in a dark room at a documentary film festival will attest, it can be extremely gruelling experience. Whilst death is never far from the screen, it’s those who live and endure suffering who leave the profoundest impact on me. This is definitely the case with Clay Tweel’s new …
Film Review: Uncertain
Uncertain is a town with a, well, uncertain future. On the Texan boarder with Louisiana, it has a population which numbers a mere 94 disparate souls. It’s not a place you chance upon or stop off on the way to somewhere else. If you find Uncertain, you’re either lost are there for a reason. Quite …
Film Review: Catfight
One of the major devices in action films is pitching two characters head-to-head. Man to Man. Mono e mono. Whether it’s Face/Off, Terminator 2, Universal Soldier, Batman vs Superman or Tom and Jerry, there’s something which captures the human imagination in a battle between two combatants for dominance. It has been an almost entirely macho …
Film Review: The Love Witch
As any genre aficionado will attest, there’s something rather magical about finding a great low budget horror film. Whilst there’s a tendency towards gore nowadays, in the ‘60s and ‘70s the likes of Roger Corman and Italian exploitation cinema garnered a reputation for producing overly camp or hammy pictures. These films still have a cult …
Film Review: Dancer
Regardless of whether you have any interest in ballet or dance, there’s something incredibly powerful about the athleticism, movement, poise and grace of a dancer. The amount of dedication, sacrifice, hard work and pain involved in reaching the top is staggering. It’s an art-form which has generated some fantastic documentaries of late. Pina, First Position, …