Film Reviews

By Jim Mackney De plus belle is a French rom-com by debut director, Anne-Gaëlle Daval, and it is a curious take on the romantic comedy genre, focusing much more on the sense of self of the main character Lucie (Florence Foresti), as she battles with the physical and mental side effects of having breast cancer. Admittedly this doesn’t sound a particularly happy area to mine for that usual light touch that romantic comedies aim for but De plus belle manages...

Seen by many to be William Friedkin’s overlooked masterpiece, Sorcerer was a box office flop and was met with rather mixed reviews upon its original release. After the budget ballooned to around £22 million, the film struggled to recoup half that at the box office. The critical response wasn’t much better with Leslie Halliwell going as far as saying that it was ‘truly insulting’. Perhaps it was because Sorcerer could not compete with Star Wars that opened the same summer or that it did not meet...

The Silence of the Lambs is a piece of classic horror cinema, and in the great canon of Hollywood horror it sits happily alongside The Exorcist and Nosferatu. The film is being re-released as part of the “BFI Thriller: Who Can You Trust” season and has been artfully up-scaled and rendered in 4K. The visuals are enhanced and do not look that out of place with modern Hollywood productions, aside from the obvious slight dull look to the colours. It...

By Michael McNulty If you’re looking for a poorly sketched portrait of Paul Gauguin, then Edouard Deluc’s film, Gauguin, might be just the thing for you.  This quasi-biography is a tepid attempt at painting the artists life in the romantic brush strokes that he surely would have liked to have been remember by. A bedraggled Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) is desperate to leave Paris, “there’s not a face or a landscape worth painting,” he passionately explains to his paintbrush wielding brethren. ...

Taking seven days to shoot and incorporating 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is one of the most memorable and iconic sequences in cinematic history. In 78/52 director Alexandre O. Philippe looks behind the curtain of Hitchcock’s most famous murder. Joining him is an impressive ensemble of directors, editors, actors, and film historians that includes Bret Easton Ellis, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elijah Wood, and Guillermo de Toro. Each has their own different experience encountering Psycho and each...

By Jim Mackney Nearly forty years have passed since The Shining was first released in 1980. It was Stanley Kubrick’s only proper foray into horror but it can be said that many of his films, A Clockwork Orange for example, have heavily flirted with the genre. This Halloween the film is being rereleased in glorious 4K! Is it worth the admission price, after nearly forty years? The honest answer to this lies somewhere in the unhelpful, no mans land of...

By Michael McNulty Joachim Trier’s latest cinematic instalment, Thelma, is a veritable melting pot of genres.  Part coming of age romance, supernatural mystery-thriller and straight family drama.  This is a dizzyingly tense, low-key film and a subtlety poignant observation on sexuality and repressed desire that wraps itself around you and squeezes. The young, attractive Thelma (Eili Harboe) has moved to Oslo for university.  Away from home for the first time, she is tentatively taking her first steps into a world...

By Anna Power Opening this year’s London Film Festival,  Andy Serkis’ directorial debut, a biopic of Robin Cavendish, a polio survivor and lifelong disability rights campaigner and with Jonathan Cavendish – Robin’s son, as Producer. Despite a syrupy start, wherein the couple meet and idyllically fall in love at first sight at a cricket match, the film turns towards tragedy when Robin is struck down with polio whilst working as a tea broker in Kenya leaving him paralysed and unable...

It is fair to say that Brawl in Cell Block 99 delivers on its title. It’s the kind of film that makes you feel like a bad person for liking it. Set in the Sothern states of the USA, the film opens with Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) losing his job as a tow truck driver. He goes home to find that his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) has been having an affair. After deciding to forgive her, he promises her a...