Incoming: Me, Myself and Mum
A cheerful and inventive comic confessional about Guillaume Gallienne’s upbringing, his relations with his mother, and his eventual embracing of his inner heterosexual after growing up as a female-identified boy whom everyone assumes is gay. Me, Myself and Mum is out in cinemas today.
DVD Review: Goodbye to Language
Jean-Luc Godard has never been one to play by the rules. Even at the august age of 83, his unflinching desire to bury down into the very fabric of cinema and philosophy never stutters. He’s never been a director to rest on his laurels and revels in taking liberties with the medium of film. Off …
DVD Review: Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem
The characters of Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) and Elisha (Simon Abkarian) will be familiar to some. They have previously appeared in the Elkabetz brothers’ To Take a Wife and The Seven Days. The former followed Viviane through her unhappy marriage, whilst the latter focussed on time spent apart. In Gett: the Trial of Viviane Amsalem proceedings move …
Film Review: Stations of the Cross
Growing up is tough. There have been many cinematic representations of this difficult period in a young person’s life. Some of the highlights included Stand By Me, The Breakfast Club, Show Me Love, The Virgin Suicides and 400 Blows. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood turned out to be to be one of the best films of 2014. …
DVD Review: A Spell To Ward Off Darkness
Ben Rivers is an experimental British film maker and Fine Art graduate, best known for his avant-garde documentary Two Years at Sea. He takes the raw image and transforms it into magical worlds. Ben Russell is also an experimental film-maker, who focusses on the very essence of cinema and the cinematic narrative. Their shared interest …
Incoming: Stations of the Cross
Told in fourteen fixed-angle, single shot, individual tableaus that parallel Christ’s journey to his own crucifixion, Stations of the Cross is both an indictment of fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen’s struggle to find her own path in life. Though from the outside Maria lives in the modern world, her family and …
DVD Review: The Possibilities Are Endless
Edywn Collins has been making music for over three decades. After forming Orange Juice in 1979 they enjoyed several years of success and even managed to break the UK top ten with Rip it Up. The Glaswegian band split in ’85 but there influence on other musicians can still be seen today. Collins himself went …
DVD Review: New Directors From Japan
Japan has a rich and colourful cinematic history and produced one of the greatest directors of all time: Yasujirō Ozu. They have an animator to outstrip anyone in the West in the shape of Hayao Miyazaki and the beautiful films of Studio Ghibli. That’s without even mentioning the inimitable Akira Kurosawa. Since the turn of …
Incoming: Concerning Violence
Narrated by Ms Lauryn Hill, Concerning Violence is both an archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s landmark book, written over 50 years ago, is …
Film Review: Winter Sleep
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the best directors working in cinema today. Ceylan seems to improve with almost every film and there’s no one who makes more visually arresting and powerful fables. Since his debut Kasaba, every film he’s made has notched-up a succession of awards. The Turkish director’s last two films (Once Upon …