Film Reviews

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...

By Linda Marric Averaging around a film a year for the last two decades, Francois Ozon has proven himself to be one of most prolific filmmakers of his generation. From the brilliant 8 femmes (2002) and Swimming Pool (2003), to the highly acclaimed French Belgian farce Potiche (2010), Ozon has managed to excel himself every time by bringing something new and precious, all the while paying homage to some of his favourite European cinematic heroes. His films have managed to...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a smart, socially conscious, funny and genuinely terrifying horror movie. Made by Blumhouse, who were also responsible for the Insidious series, the film has been one of the most eagerly awaited genre movies of the year, on the strength of its trailer alone. Dealing with issues of race in the post-Obama era, Get Out cleverly pays homage to a whole host of films from Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (Stanley Kramer,...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Outside of Akira, the odd Studio Ghibli production, and a couple episodes of Dragon Ball Z watched as a child I haven’t really seen much anime. Despite an almost constant supply of acclaimed Japanese animation these films have never quite seemed to have established the audience that many believe they should. A Silent Voice then stands as the next in a long line of anime films hoping to covert English speaking cinema goers to the genre. A Silent...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel On cursory inspection, the new film from French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, the sixth already from a man not due to turn 28 until next month, is a distant proposition. It seems sterile and forbidding, full of stagey artifice, which is not necessarily a surprise given it’s an adaptation of Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play of the same name. And it is all these things, only very deliberately so to achieve an even greater impact. The premise is simple...