DVD/Blu-Ray Review
DVD Review: A Jester’s Tale
Karel Zeman was a Czech film maker and master animator. He’s most famous for directing pictures which mixed live-action fantasy with beautiful animation. I was lucky enough to visit a museum dedicated to his work in Prague this year. He made such magical and delightful films full of humour and great entertainment. Zeman has influenced …
DVD Review: A Birder’s Guide to Everything
Coming of age films arrive in many different shapes and sizes. The most successful ones tend to be those that don’t obviously play-up the traumas of the teenage years. Instead, they filter it into the backdrop of another story entirely. In Rob Meyer’s first feature film, A Birder’s Guide to Everything, he manages to capture …
DVD Review: Mr Morgan’s Last Love
Assumed accents and mixed language films are a precarious undertaking. Whilst some actors can pull it off superbly there’s always the worry that things will descend into a Far and Away style mess. In Mr Morgan’s Last Love, Michael Caine struggles with an American accent which all too often drops out or goes over the …
DVD Review: The Soft Skin
Many of François Truffaut’s film have elements of the autobiographical and The Soft Skin is no exception. Written in collaboration with Jean-Louis Richard, the French director in renowned for having affairs with his leading ladies. Luckily for Truffaut he didn’t suffer the same fate as Jean Desailly does in the film. On his way to …
DVD Review: Divergent
There’s been a huge market for young adult fiction over the last decade with the trend for horror/fantasy moving towards dystopian sci-fi. With The Hunger Games already becoming a huge box office hit and The Maze Runner shortly to follow, the next set of best-selling books to get a cinematic makeover are Veronica Roth’s Divergent …
DVD Review: Sake Bomb
Asian comedies can sometimes lose much of their humour in translation, often struggling to find a Western market. I remember watching the Japanese comedy Ping Pong, which is a lowbrow American Pie imitation until about halfway through when it suddenly changed into a serious drama It was a very bizarre experience. However, when it’s done …
DVD Review: Bound
The Wachowski Brothers achieved fame with the Matrix films, but it’s easy to forget that they started out with a bold and striking crime thriller which not only challenged convention, but turned out to be one of the most remarkable films of that year. Bound might not be on the same scale or scope as …
DVD Review: Half of a Yellow Sun
Based on the Orange Prize for Fiction winning novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun was always going to be a difficult novel to adapt. Indeed, whilst director Biyi Bandele makes a good fist of it, the source material is not suited to a big screen adaptation. However, the impressive case lead …
DVD Review: A Long Way Down
Bestselling author Nick Hornby has seen several of his novels adapted to film. Whilst there have been some undeniable successes in the shape of About a Boy, Fever Pitch and High Fidelity but there’s also been the abject failure of The Perfect Catch (a disastrous Americanisation of Fever Pitch). A Long Way Down has an …
DVD Review: A Hard Day’s Night
The Beatles are possibly the most well known pop group in history, but when A Hard Day’s Night was released they were only on the cusp of world domination. The band received many offers to make a film, but didn’t want to merely be the musical accompaniment to the action taking place on screen; they …