French film Comme Un Homme (Bad Seeds) is an interesting yet uneasy blend of the neo-noir and the bildungsfilm. The story follows two middle-class teenaged boys, Greg (Kevin Azais) and Louis (Emile Berling), as they kidnap a young female teacher from their school. Greg is a delinquent with behavioural issues that escalate to the point Read More
The term “Oscar movie”, which usually denotes a well-made film that is self-consciously worthy has already been repeated in many reviews of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s new film, Untouchable. There seems to be no doubt the film will at least be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film given the level of acclaim Read More
ParaNorman is a 3D stop motion zombie horror comedy by Laika, the makers of the critically acclaimed Coraline. Their latest offering has all the elements of classic horror genre films: zombies, of course, and lots of ghosts and ghouls – as well as a witch, and an ancient evil curse which incites a stereotypical angry Read More
The latest film from German director Christian Petzold, Barbara, has received a number of awards, including a nomination as Germany’s entry for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. Set in East Germany in 1980, the story revolves around Barbara Wolff, played by Petzold’s ‘muse’ Nina Hoss. Wolff is a paediatrician who is sent to a provincial Read More
Fredrik Gertten’s Big Boys Gone Bananas!* tells the kind of gripping, contemporary story of Kafkaesque corporate persecution that any earnest politicised documentary maker would take pains to seek out. Any earnest politicised documentary maker except for Fredrik Gertten, that is. The subject of Gertten’s latest documentary is himself, and the alarming media harassment and debilitating Read More
Eight senior citizens, each between the ages of 80 and 100, representing six countries, have one common goal: a gold medal at the International Over-80s Table Tennis Championships. In a nutshell, this is the eccentric medley of characters that up-and-coming filmmaker Hugh Hartford has assembled in his latest documentary Ping Pong. The film is as Read More
The release of Christopher Nolan’s Inception in 2010 left the landscape of the action-thriller genre irrevocably changed. Despite its oddly sterile characters and environments, the film’s sleek cerebral plotting and brain-bending, complex theorisations about time showed that blockbuster audiences don’t have to be patronised to be entertained. As Hollywood tries to catch up with the Read More
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”; these were the words that sprang to mind as I watched Leo Carax’s Holy Motors on Friday afternoon. After a veritable silence of thirteen years, Holy Motors is a two-hour excursion into the utterly bizarre. After drumming up considerable conversation at Cannes, Read More
Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography is the second exhibition being held at the Mcmanus Galleries in partnership with the V&A.The exhibition charts the evolution of fashion photography, from its humble beginnings in the early 1900s, through its 1960s heyday, to its changing status and significance in an image- saturated 21st century. Included Read More
No One But Me is a deeply personal and yet easily accessible documentary from filmmaker Brian Ross, telling the life story of Scottish-born Jazz sensation Annie Ross. Annie was born in Glasgow but moved to New York at the age of four to live with her aunt Ella Logan, a successful singer. Annie describes the Read More