By Michael McNulty We fade in from black and are travelling down a dark country road. Trees with stiff, twisted branches flash by. The accompanying carnival music is beautifully eerie, conjuring images of merry- go-rounds and subtly hinting at the circular existence of the lives of the characters we are...
By Linda Marric It isn’t often that you come across a factual feature film which is capable of hitting its audiences the way Rahul Jain’s Machines does. The film which offers a look into to the intricacies of modern day labour, not only manages to wake in its viewers a...
By Linda Marric King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or to give it its full name, “lock stock and a whole load of Arthurian cockney nonsense”, is the latest offering from Guy Ritchie. Directed by Ritchie himself and staring Charlie Hunnam, King Arthur is not so much an epic fantasy...
By James McAllister “Our system is rotten. It doesn’t reward honest politicians who vote with their conscious; it rewards rats, who are willing to sell out their country to keep their noses in the trough.” Miss Sloane may have been made back in early 2016, when the prospect of a...
By Michael McNulty Bronco Bullfrog was the first of only three features directed by Barney Platts-Mills. He was 25 and working with a group of largely non-professional actors, some of whom were sourced from Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. Produced on a modest budget of £ 18,000, the film featured at...
By Wyndham Hacket Pain Set in the ‘Vegas of the North’, Away follows Ria (Juno Temple) and Joseph (Timothy Spall) who have both escaped to Blackpool in an attempt to distance themselves from the problems in their lives. Ria is hiding from her abusive boyfriend, while Joseph is trying to...
By Linda Marric Hope Dickson Leach’s brilliant first feature The Levelling is a fantastically accurate and highly authentic look into the flood-battered West-country regions. This beautifully acted film, not only manages to tell a touching story of despair and isolation in rural England, but also succeeds in making a valid...
By James McAllister Confronting us with the devastating divisions that helped provoke last year’s Brexit vote, here is a shatteringly sombre social-realist drama that moves away from the traditional inner-city environment regularly frequented by the likes of Ken Loach, and rests its focus on rural Somerset’s stark landscape. Set mere...
By Wyndham Hacket Pain Looking at the premise of Jawbone you’d be forgiven for sighing and thinking not another boxing film. In the last couple of years alone Bleed for This, Southpaw, Creed, Grudge Match, and Hands of Stone have all been released, with mixed success. Cinema’s love of the...