What remains long after the credits of Petra Volpe’s sophomore feature, The Divine Order, have finished rolling is the historical context in which the film is set. There will undoubtedly be a great number who see this film (writer included) who will be shocked by the revelation that the women...
Tarik Saleh’s Sundance winner, The Nile Hilton Incident, is a gritty, noir-thriller set in the days leading up to Egypt’s 2011 revolution. January 2011 and we’re landed in the dizzying hustle and bustle of Cairo’s amoral Kasr El-Nil police precinct where back-hand dealings and corruption run rife. The murder of...
Netflix is famously tight-lipped about the viewership data for their Original releases, and in the case of Mute this might be for the best. For one wonders why anybody would, after the first five minutes, want to sit through the remaining two hours. Duncan Jones, whose minimalist, lo-fi science fiction...
For many, the story of John Curry will be an unfamiliar one, but James Erskine, the director behind 2013’s Battle of the Sexes, intimate documentary, The Ice King, about the “best ice skater in the world,” is a graceful success. John Curry’s story begins like many, in his childhood, when...
Daniel Fitzsimmons’ debut feature is scuppered by an undercooked script and half-baked ideas that fail to ignite any real feeling in sci-fi psychological drama, Native. After a telepathic alien hive race discovers a strange musical transmission being emitted from a far off planet, two scientists, Cane (Rupert Graves) and Eva...
Sometimes, it can feel like a hard slog looking for a great film to enjoy on a Friday night after a long week. More often than not we turn to the cinema to get our film fix, and rightly so, because every week, especially at the moment, you’re pretty much...
“I’m sweating here. Roasting. Boiling. Baking. Sweltering. It’s like a sauna. Furnace. You could fry an egg on my stomach,” narrates Ray Winstone’s Gary “Gal” Dove, before The Stranglers “Peaches” kicks in and he takes a break from crisping himself under the white-hot heat of the Spanish sun to place...
Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, set in a dystopic near future, is a sleek sci-fi thriller that imagines a world where eugenics dictate people’s standing in society. It was Niccol’s directorial debut, released before The Truman Show - the script for which Niccol’s would earn an academy nomination - and made on a...
Makala, the new film from French documentarian Emmanuel Gras, is an elegiac, lyrical journey into the heart, soul and determined resilience of a young charcoal producer in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kabwita is a 28 year old Congolese man who, with his wife Lydie and their three children, lives...