For a few minutes, you get some nicely framed, crisp images of a pretty house. The wide angle gives you a decent view and the scene is set in promising fashion. We know the film is going to be about absence, so the wide frame leaves room for absence - and for stillness. Yet still, … Continue reading Cuatro Paredes (Review)
Category: Films
Have You Seen… Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)?
To even describe Céline and Julie Go Boating is antithetical to the experience. It is a purposefully rambling and anti-narrative piece more in love with spontaneity and energy than it is with anything else. It is a film about breaking the rules, about repetitions and deviations, and ultimately about the nature of cinema itself. Fundamentally, … Continue reading Have You Seen… Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)?
Palm Springs (Review)
Groundhog Day was a groundbreaking romantic comedy and now is a genre in its own right. The better time loop comedies, and Palm Springs is one of them, recognise the metaphorical potential as well as the comedic potential of the premise and spread themselves evenly over both sides. This film is a great balancing act. … Continue reading Palm Springs (Review)
Have You Seen… Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)?
In Virginia Woolf’s outstanding work of literary non-fiction, A Room of One’s Own, she explores the supposed lack of ‘Great Female Artists’. She is not the only one to explore this, and it is also a very Euro - and white - centric argument that is rejected by many. Art Historian Griselda Pollock, for one, … Continue reading Have You Seen… Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)?
Godzilla vs. Kong (Review)
Before 2014’s Godzilla, the Americans had a bad track record when translating the King of the Monsters for Western audiences. This process began with abysmal re-edits of the first three Godzilla movies: butchering the original products, diluting their impact and adding terrible extra footage (interestingly, this included a re-cut of the original King Kong vs. … Continue reading Godzilla vs. Kong (Review)
Have you seen… The Green Fog (2017)?
Welcome to ‘Have You Seen….’ a regular column exploring an interesting film that is worthy of greater attention – for good or for ill. The focus is on the underseen, the undersung or the underrated – or just those films you just need to write about. The focus is analysis more than evaluation so, expect … Continue reading Have you seen… The Green Fog (2017)?
Blackberrying (Review)
This enthralling mix of raw realism and uncanny surrealism makes for an evocative portrait of loss. By carefully balancing a sense of fantasy and reality, the filmmakers effortlessly convey the complex idea that grief can often feel unreal. Actual loss is so hard to deal with that our emotive recollections of those who have left … Continue reading Blackberrying (Review)
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Review)
About half way through Zack Snyder's laborious 'reboot' of an already terrible film, two of our superhero protagonists - Cyborg and The Flash - are digging up Clark Kent's corpse. Why? Well, for drawn out and contrived reasons and - fundamentally - for the same contrived reasons as in the original version (directed and completed … Continue reading Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Review)
Judas and the Black Messiah (Review)
Much to its credit, Judas and the Black Messiah takes an important story and tells it with real energy. Audiences will leave the film informed and with a clear picture of the importance of the Black Panther Party and of the villainy of the Feds and the police (and other) that fought against them. The … Continue reading Judas and the Black Messiah (Review)
Gunda (Review)
Where most nature documentaries focus on anthropomorphising their subjects, Gunda instead zoomorphises the viewer. This is a black and white documentary that purely observes. We watch farm animals (limited to pigs, chickens and cows) and there is no music or voiceover. It is just animals in their given environment. The shooting style is uniformly immersive, … Continue reading Gunda (Review)
Assorted Opinions 