By Michael McNulty John Goldschmidt’s Dough, penned by first time scriptwriters Jonathon Benson and Jez Freedman, feels like an afterschool special that’s trying to take on too much. Race, religion, culture and age, the differences, the divisions, the need to look past them all and come together is what this...
By Linda Marric Directed by Xiaogang Feng and staring Chinese superstar Feng Xiaogang, I am Not Madam Bovary is a film like no other film you’ve seen before. This beautifully crafted and unusually shot film is everything you’d want from a social commentary film. It touches on themes ranging from...
By Linda Marric What more is there to be said about The Beatles that hasn’t already been said before. In It Was 50 Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper and Beyond, which by all accounts has the clunkiest title for a documentary you could ever think of, director Alan...
By Michael McNulty Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour, released in 1967, took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stands in film history as one of the most, if not the most, erotic films of all time. Based on Joseph Kessel’s, a Russian who lived in Argentina...
By Linda Marric Considered by many as one of the most talented animators working in Europe at the moment, Michael Dudok de Wit hit the jackpot when he was approached out of the blue by Studio Ghibli to make a film with them. The result was one of the best...
The Other Side of Hope concerns itself with the struggles of two contrasting men who have both left their homes. One is Khlaed (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki via a dozen other European countries and who hopes to have finally found a new home. The...
The Red Turtle opens with the sight of a nameless man struggling to stay on-board his small boat in a huge storm. After he wakes on a deserted island, he finds water and fruit to live off, but decides to leave and builds a bamboo raft to sail away on....
By Linda Marric For an animation film primarily aimed at children, Spark: A Space Tale seems to spend an unusual amount of time trying to please its adult viewers. With multiple attempts at referencing anything from Stars Wars to WALL·E ( Andrew Stanton, 2008), director Aaron Wooley tries his very...
By Linda Marric First of all let’s start with the good news, because despite earlier misgiving about yet another outing, there is no doubt that the fifth film in the Pirates of The Caribbean franchise is far more coherent than its most recent predecessor. Yes Salazar’s Revenge is way more...