Film Reviews
Only God Forgives & Reality
Saturday, July 20th, 2013 Film Reviews,“Time to meet the devil,” says Billy to his brother, Julian, before setting out for a big night on the town in old Bangkok. Billy, who runs a kick-boxing franchise and deals drugs, has unusual tastes in entertainment. We meet him next in a bordello staring at a group of girls, but feeling disappointed because […]
We Steal Secrets, A Gun in Each Hand, Pacific Rim
Saturday, July 13th, 2013 Film Reviews,If ever you had a sneaking feeling that Julian Assange was not the ultimate hero and martyr of our time, Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets will turn suspicion into certainty. The portrait of the WikiLeaks founder that emerges from this documentary reveals a man whose quest for truth has become an exercise in personal propaganda. […]
Man of Steel & Everybody Has a Plan
Saturday, July 6th, 2013 Film Reviews,When comic book heroes are turned into sensitive brooding souls, there is something twisted in our culture. We’ve seen a tortured Batman and now an angst-ridden Superman filled with anxiety about his true identity and how people might react to his superpowers. To complete the psychological profile the new Superman has a difficult childhood. He […]
The Look of Love & In the House
Saturday, June 29th, 2013 Film Reviews,“I started out with a mind-reading act,” says Paul Raymond, ‘the King of Soho’. “I soon realised that people liked to look at attractive girls, and they liked it even more if the girls had no clothes on. So in that sense, and in that sense alone, I could read people’s minds.”The producers of The […]
After Earth & The Internship
Saturday, June 22nd, 2013 Film Reviews,According to British market analyst, Nick Meaney, an incontrovertible algorithm reveals that any film starring Will Smith is guaranteed to make money. No sooner had we imbibed this piece of scientific wisdom than Smith appeared in After Earth, a movie of incontrovertible mediocrity that suggests the algorithm is a dud. No one ever claimed a […]
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet & A Lady in Paris
Saturday, June 15th, 2013 Film Reviews,Jean Anouillh (1910-87) was a prolific and successful dramatist in the years after the Second World War, the evolution of whose work reads like a condensed history of modern French literature. He begins as a realist; makes his reputation with plays wrtten in a poetic, neo-classical style; before flirting with absurdism and a self-conscious form […]
Farewell My Queen & Fast and Furious 6
Saturday, June 8th, 2013 Film Reviews,Everyone knows the story of doomed, frivolous Marie Antoinette whose life of pampered luxury was ended by the guillotine. The Queen’s personality was established in filmmakers’ minds by Stefan Zweig’s best-selling biography of 1932, subtitled The Portrait of an Average Woman, and she has never been allowed to deviate too far from that model. Among […]
The Great Gatsby & Happiness Never Comes Alone
Saturday, June 1st, 2013 Film Reviews,It has become a cliché to call Baz Luhrmann a director of video clips rather than motion pictures, but like so many clichés this one has the ring of truth. The Great Gatsby – long-awaited, much-talked-about, supremely overhyped – has arrived. It shows Luhrmann demonstrating his gift for lavish spectacle and his lack of almost […]
The Reluctant Fundamentalist & Sinister
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 Film Reviews,Mohsin Hamid says the structure of his novel of 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was partly based on Fred Zinnemann’s classic western, High Noon. Instead of Gary Cooper waiting for the baddies to arrive, we have a group of militant students in Lahore awaiting the police and a group of American agents. It sounds good in […]
A Place For Me & Broken
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 Film Reviews,Earlier this year I watched an old Hammer Horror called The Plague of the Zombies. As an alternative title for Josh Boone’s debut feature, A Place for Me, I’d respectfully suggest: The Plague of the Writers. It is a scenario worthy of any horror flick to find a family in which everyone – and their […]