By Linda Marric One minute into the credits of Kong: Skull Island and you can’t help but smile, because you know this isn’t going to be one of “those” monster films with unending battle scenes and little else. So if you were expecting a testosterone drenched blockbuster a la Michael...
By Stephen Mayne @finalreel A montage near the end jumps through a diverse collection of fans explaining what heavy metal band X Japan means to them. Aside from adoration in their homeland, others from around the world express admiration, ranging from people who used their music to deal with dark...
Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP It takes some time to adjust to the accents of the characters in Trespass Against Us, not because they are difficult to understand, but because gangsters and criminals are not meant to sound like this. The rural west of England is not the traditional location for...
By Linda Marric @linda_marric Kelly Reichardt’s films are beautifully crafted poetic pieces feature unusual stories about unusual people. By her own admission, her films are “glimpses of people passing through”. Reichardt’s painstakingly long takes and repetitive quotidian scenes are what makes her productions into masterpieces of modern cinema. The Night...
By: Michael McNulty It’s Friday night, supper’s finished, the washing ups been done and you’ve settled into the front room. Time for the great debate: what to watch tonight? You’ve exhausted your pre-recorded programmes, there’s nothing tickling your fancy on the TV and all the later screenings at your local...
By Stephen Mayne @finalreel It’s easy to get carried away thinking of films as art, but sometimes it’s just a job. Southern Fury highlights this point, rounding up Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and Adrien Grenier, all of whom can surely only be in this dire thriller for the paycheck. Lacking...
By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Tomato red is almost the colour of Jamalee Merridew’s hair, and it’s the name of the Daniel Woodrell novel from which this film is adapted. Woodrell has written nine novels to date, a number of them set in the bleak forgotten lands of the Ozarks; mountainous...
By Stephen Mayne @finalreel On cursory inspection, the new film from French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, the sixth already from a man not due to turn 28 until next month, is a distant proposition. It seems sterile and forbidding, full of stagey artifice, which is not necessarily a surprise given it’s...
By Leslie Byron Pitt I’m sure some will consider me a philistine for my dislike for We Are the Flesh. Some may perhaps consider me a wuss. Indoctrinated on too main mainstream cinema to deal with the more shocking aspects of Emiliano Rocha Minter’s transgressive art film. It’s clear that...