Film Reviews

Setting a film in an orphanage, one expects a tale filled with suffering. My Life As A Courgette is a creative accomplishment, managing to be heartwarming and light, even when it’s touching upon the dark subject matter of childhood pain and abandonment. This beautifully animated film is based on a novel by French writer Gilles Paris, and director Claude Barras and screenwriter Céline Sciamma have skilfully managed to create a tender coming of age story, where the loss and abuse...

By Michael McNulty John Goldschmidt’s Dough, penned by first time scriptwriters Jonathon Benson and Jez Freedman, feels like an afterschool special that’s trying to take on too much. Race, religion, culture and age, the differences, the divisions, the need to look past them all and come together is what this film is all about, with a “save the shop” thread running through the middle. Nat (Jonathan Pryce), an aging Jewish baker, with a dwindling customer base runs the risk of...

By Linda Marric What more is there to be said about The Beatles that hasn’t already been said before. In It Was 50 Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper and Beyond, which by all accounts has the clunkiest title for a documentary you could ever think of, director Alan G. Parker offers a rather disappointing, overly long, and altogether messy account of the band during the making of the eponymous album. The film also offers a look behind the...

The Other Side of Hope concerns itself with the struggles of two contrasting men who have both left their homes. One is Khlaed (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki via a dozen other European countries and who hopes to have finally found a new home. The other is Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), who leaves his alcoholic wife and life as a shirt salesman, and is soon seen risking his life savings in a poker game. After winning...

By Linda Marric For an animation film primarily aimed at children, Spark: A Space Tale seems to spend an unusual amount of time trying to please its adult viewers. With multiple attempts at referencing anything from Stars Wars to WALL·E ( Andrew Stanton, 2008), director Aaron Wooley tries his very best to inject some much needed life into the narrative, but sadly falls short of entirely convincing. With a voice cast which includes Jessica Biel, Hilary Swank, Patrick Stewart and...

By James McAllister “Our system is rotten. It doesn’t reward honest politicians who vote with their conscious; it rewards rats, who are willing to sell out their country to keep their noses in the trough.” Miss Sloane may have been made back in early 2016, when the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was more an outlandish nightmare than a chilling reality, but some 15 months on, its release could not be timelier. In a new era of ignorance, here...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain Set in the ‘Vegas of the North’, Away follows Ria (Juno Temple) and Joseph (Timothy Spall) who have both escaped to Blackpool in an attempt to distance themselves from the problems in their lives. Ria is hiding from her abusive boyfriend, while Joseph is trying to cope with the death of his wife, and as the story progresses they form an unlikely friendship. The film is told in a split time frame in a poor attempt...

By James McAllister Confronting us with the devastating divisions that helped provoke last year’s Brexit vote, here is a shatteringly sombre social-realist drama that moves away from the traditional inner-city environment regularly frequented by the likes of Ken Loach, and rests its focus on rural Somerset’s stark landscape. Set mere months after the winter floods that decimated the Somerset Levels back in early 2014, The Levelling follows Clover (Ellie Kendrick), a trainee vet who returns home to the family farm...

By Michael McNulty We’ve seen it before in the forms of The Odd Couple, Due Date, Trains, Planes and Automobiles and a million others. An at odds pair with a strong dislike for each other, possibly even hatred, are forced together through circumstance only to slowly come together, become the ying to the others yang and form a long lasting relationship based on friendship and mutual respect. Set against the backdrop of the 2006 St. Andrews Agreement, Nick Hamm’s The...