DVD & VOD

by Leslie Byron Pitt Despite critical acclaim Kubo and the Two Strings only just claimed back its relatively small $60 million budget with its box office gross. We shouldn’t always run to the bean counters to try and attain a film's sense of value, but it’s important to notice that out of the four feature films that stop motion company Laika have made, the return has been the weakest. This is despite the kind words that have been bestowed on...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel To the uninitiated, the world Todd Solondz has set out over the course of eight features must appear a baffling one. It’s likely to be just as confusing to those who have stumbled across work stretching back nearly three decades. Wiener-Dog continues his merging of bone-dry humour and startlingly underplayed drama resulting in an anthology piece of varying success. The one constant across four stories is the wiener dog of the title, a passive observer thrown...

To celebrate the release of Pedro Almodovar's latest film Julieta we're giving away two cometition packs comprising a dvd of Julieta and the film poster! Starring EMMA SUÁREZ as Adult Julieta and ADRIANA UGARTE as Young Julieta, JULIETA is written and directed by Spanish auteur PEDRO ALMODÓVAR and is based on the short stories Chance, Soon and Silence by Alice Munro. JULIETA will be released in the UK on Blu-ray™ and DVD through Twentieth Century Fox and Pathé on 9 January 2017....

By Wyndham Hacket Pain Originally released in 1992 and winner of that year’s Best Foreign Film Academy Award, it has been nearly 25 years since Indochine was in cinemas. The new DVD re-release and restoration couldn’t in many ways be more timely with an entire generation, including myself, missing the release first time round. This feels like an opportunity to revaluate a film that seems to sit in an in-between state, as it has neither garnered recent acclaim nor classic...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain There was potential for a film about a current athlete who has only recently witnessed major success to feel like an EPSN special, looking behind the scenes of their success. No Easy Mile is more subtle than this and contains much more cinematic skill than the average sports documentary. It may not reach the heights of Asif Kapadia’s Senna, but there is definitely an attempt to delve deeper into the achievements of track athlete Mo Farah...

By James McAllistair @jamesmca90 Back in the early 90s, The New Yorker printed a single-panel pasquinade drawn by Peter Steiner, which featured a computer-savvy canine sat a desk, chatting to another who listened from the floor below; “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” read the accompanying caption. Wryly indicative of the anonymity afforded to all those who surfed the web, its publication also held a wider significance – symbolically denoting society’s growing fascination and developed understanding of the internet;...

By Linda Marric  @Linda_Marric Fresh from a very public falling out with the producers of his last project, Dying Of The Light, which he says was taken away from him, Veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader’s is back with an astonishingly bonkers new production which will confuse even some of his most fervent fans. Dog Eat Dog is an ugly nihilist piece showcasing all that is wrong with the world and featuring a group of unpleasant characters with little or no redeeming...

By Linda Marric @Linda_Marric Fresh from the highly acclaimed Love Is Strange, Ira Sachs is back with a new production which deals with similar themes of New York real Estate and its devastating effects on human relations. Little Men tells the story of how the gentrification of a formally working class neighbourhood scuppers the burgeoning friendship between two adolescent boys who’s families become embroiled in a bitter rent dispute. Sensitive, introvert Jake (Theo Taplitz) and son of latin American immigrants...

Review by Leslie Byron Pitt/@Afrofilmviewer When Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson original left the WWE to become a movie star, it was easy to see him as a star in the same vein as Arnold Schwarzenegger: A heavyweight presence who may not have a decent set of thespian chops, and would do little else but wield large firearms with remarkable ease and walk away from explosions like the coolest guy around. Looking back at Johnson’s Career now that he’s been branded...