Tag: mystery
Gone Girl
Saturday, October 4th, 2014 Film Reviews,Having written a smash No. 1 bestseller, there are not many authors with the discipline – or know-how – to sit down and thrash out the screenplay. This makes Gillian Flynn a rare talent, as she has managed to take a brilliant novel and put it through all those necessary cuts and compressions required of […]
The Keeper of Lost Causes
Saturday, August 2nd, 2014 Film Reviews,An art critic of my acquaintance once boasted he had never read a detective novel. This claim was intended to make him seem an intellectual, but it only showed the narrowness of his mind. When writers such as André Gide and Francois Mauriac wrote admiringly of the detective stories of Georges Simenon, we can see […]
Frank
Saturday, June 21st, 2014 Film Reviews,Frank is a movie that makes a fiction out of a difficult truth. The model for the lead character, who spends almost the entire movie walking around with a large papier-maché head lodged on his shoulders, was Frank Sidebottom, the creation of Chris Sievey (1955-2010), a wannabee rock star who found that wearing a different […]
Transcendence
Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 Film Reviews,With poor attendences in the United States and disastrous reviews, Wally Pfister’s Transcendence is set to be the biggest hi-tech, mega-budget, sci-fi flop since After Earth, last year’s misbegotten star vehicle for Will Smith and son. It’s not an entirely fair comparison because Transcendence is a much better film. Its failure is not due to […]
The Past
Saturday, February 15th, 2014 Film Reviews,To the best of my knowledge there is not a single ten minute lesbian sex scene in the entire corpus of Iranian cinema. For films made in Iran even the simplest questions about sex, religion or morality can fall foul of the censors. The paradox is that these strictures have produced a body of work […]
Night Train to Lisbon
Saturday, December 7th, 2013 Film Reviews,In Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), which marries pretension and sexploitation in a way that only the 1960s could conceive, Marianne Faithfull abandons her boring schoolteacher husband and roars off to Switzerland on a big Harley-Davidson for a romantic assignation with Alain Delon. Most girls might think this sounds like a perfectly logical […]
Stoker & The Best Offer
Saturday, August 31st, 2013 Film Reviews,There was a moment in the 1980s when Australian directors such as Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong heard the siren call of Hollywood and went to make films in the United States. It seems this alluring melody is now drifting towards South Korea, with directors such as Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), Bong Joon-ho (The […]
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 […]
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 […]