Many people go to the movies nowadays to get away from everyday life- they don’t want to be reminded of poverty, mundane routine and one’s own inevitable aging. This leads me to believe that not a lot of people will go to see Alexander Payne’s Nebraska as it is full of these themes, and yet, Read More
When dealing with the subject of young people there’s an awful temptation for filmmakers to produce a feature which is “cool”. The most up to date music coupled with some flashy visuals and hot young stars make an inviting prospect for audiences which normally wouldn’t have any interest in the film’s subject. Kill Your Darlings Read More
Sugar coated and wrapped up in fluff, Saving Mr Banks is a wonderful portrayal of the magic of Walt Disney and of the determination necessary to fulfil the promise of Disney to his daughters that he would adapt P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins for the screen. Mrs Travers, a formidable woman who refused for twenty years Read More
Having read nothing beyond the most basic plot synopsis for Don Jon, I was not expecting much from this screening. I assumed “Jersey-Shore style ladies’ man and porn connoisseur finds love with woman who expects him to change his lifestyle” was going to be a puerile comedy running entirely on sex jokes and cleavage shots. Read More
This film begins with the obvious portents: Dr. Ryan Stone (her father wanted a boy), played by Sandra Bullock, is space sick; her ECG levels are off and she can’t adapt to the constant movement of anti-gravity. After only 6 months of intensive NASA training, the medical engineer embarks on her first mission aboard the Read More
Short Term 12 is director Destin Cretton’s first feature length film but, if its success is anything to go by, it will not be his last. The film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 2013 SXSW Festival and, on the whole, brings a refreshing subtlety to Read More
In Arabic, Adéle’ means ‘justice’, and it’s wonderful to see that Abdellatif Kechiche’s masterpiece has rightfully received it’s ‘Adéle’ – not only in critical accolades but in global audience attention too. This film is overflowing with subjects to discuss: New Queer Cinema, physicality, use of colour, twenty-first century existentialism (which Adéle defines as “existence, essence; Read More
The Devil in the ocean, [how] it had cursed the town and all the children in it. Paul Wright’s first feature length film has been widely anticipated after his short Until the River Runs Red, a story of a little girl, God’s daughter, lost and wandering in the wilderness, won Best Short at the BAFTA Read More
In his eloquent Reith Lectures of 1993, Edward Said argued that intellectual work is also political, that as an intellectual one had a “special duty” to make sure that the “authorised powers of one’s own society” are “accountable”. The public intellectual is both inside and outside society, knowing his society intimately but also seeing it Read More
Spanning four to five years and set sometime during the decade after the second World War, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a story about liminality and transitions. The plot follows the homeward journey of Bob (Casey Affleck), a man born into a life of crime as he returns to his wife Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Read More