DVD & VOD

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Eight years from inception to completion but The Tale of The Princess Kaguya has been worth the wait. Isao Takhata’s swansong, an adaption of an ancient Japanese folktale, is a nuanced tale with added spiritual dimensions. Springing from a bamboo shoot, growing at an exponential rate, Studio Ghibli offers the viewer a Princess it’s hard not to fall in love with. Princess Kaguya progresses from adorable baby to strong-willed teenager within the space of a year. But...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film '71 is a darkly disturbing, intensely evocative, riveting portrayal of a young soldier's experience of war, in the bitterest of conflicts, that of the Northern Ireland troubles. Jack O'Connell (Starred Up) is rapidly emerging as the actor of his generation with his elliptical, highly emotive performance as private Gary Hook, an army new recruit from small town Derbyshire. From children's home to army barracks, his first posting sees his troop rerouted to Belfast due to increasing...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan is a tale of rot and corruption in modern day Russia that is as brittle and barren as the skeletal Whale carcass beached on the shore of this remote northwestern Russian town. Unforgiving and relentless, the film’s darkness is offset by exquisite raucous vodka-drenched banter of the kind that provokes laughter and blushes in equal measure. A rough re-working of the Old Testament’s Book of Job, it tells the story of Kolya (Alexei...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Kim Longinotto's documentary Dreamcatcher has I suspect used up my full years supply of tears. Longinotto is an almost entirely silent presence behind the camera, which feels right for the stories she documents; giving, ex-prostitute and current Dreamcatcher Foundation advocate Brenda Myers-Powell, as well as the numerous women Brenda supports, the space to tell their own stories. The Dreamcatcher Foundation, as their site states fights to end human sex trafficking in Chicago. And the stories told...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film The Imitation Game comes to Blu-ray and DVD from 9th March, 2015, courtesy of StudioCanal. See below to win a copy on Blu Ray. A simple story about a complicated man, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), the Cambridge mathematician whose unquantifiable contribution to the decoding of Enigma, is a story previously unheralded on screen before The Imitation Game. Based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, the film faithfully portrays the complexity of Turing’s...

By Anna Power Pride is a funny, heartwarming, celebratory film about the real-life union between gay rights campaigners in London and striking Welsh miners. Set in the 80’s, depicting a time when the harsh policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government made insurgents out of the least likely, crossing societal divisions of class, race, gender and sexual identity, when politically the only side to be on was - any side but Thatcher’s side. Throw into the mix a stonking 80’s soundtrack (The...

By Leslie Byron Pitt @Afrofilmviewer afrofilmviewer.com Nowadays I find myself, much more compelled to revisit the latest features of Cronenberg as opposed to his more explicit shock flicks that appeared earlier in his career. My main reason for this I feel is, as a director, Cronenberg has elevated his themes of body horror, carnal pleasures, and creative enterprise gone awry, to its peak. His love the viral and transfer of fluids hasn’t left him, however, while his films had a more...

By Emily Wight About halfway through Maidan, a man climbs up the side of a disused bus with its windows smashed and seats wrenched off their hinges, and yells at the sea of riot police lined up behind it: “Are you people or animals?” None of them respond, but with explosions and chants roaring through the air, they may well not have heard. If it were to have emerged from Syria or Iraq over the past few years, footage like...

By Sam Inglis @24fpsUK 24fps.org.uk Kumiko The Treasure Hunter starts out by telling us it's a true story, but it does so in a unique way. The caption comes from another film, Fargo, which was lying in its caption. It's the beginning of an interesting relationship between this film and the 'truth'. Kumiko is based on the true story of a Japanese woman who was found dead in North Dakota in 2001. She had frozen to death after searching for...