Film Reviews

By Anna Power @powerpops An extraordinary story, Lion will lock your heart in a vice and squeeze it till all the tears come out and do so without pandering to melodrama. Based on the heartbreaking true story of five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who having pestered his teenage brother Guddu (Priyanka Bose) to let him go with him to look for night work - both boys work to assist their single mother and help feed the family, on this...

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...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric In light of the praise bestowed upon director Damien Chazelle and his cast at this year’s Golden Globes, some might feel that other more “worthy” productions might have been more deserving of the accolades. This is precisely why one should come out in defence of La La Land and its enchanting, unabashed tribute to the old MGM musicals. Starring two of the most loved and respected actor of the moment, La La Land is a disarmingly...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester By The Sea is a beautifully crafted powerful story which centres around themes of loss, frayed human relations, and more importantly the persistence of grief and how people deal with loss in different ways. Lonergan is well versed on things of this nature, given his critically acclaimed debut featureYou Can Count On Me which dealt with similar subjects. Casey Affleck is Lee, a withdrawn hard-working Boston handyman whose world...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Having seen the film poster countless times on my way to work each day, and seeing the image of the boy next to the large tree-like monster, I couldn’t help but think that A Monster Calls was simply going to be a retelling of The BFG. Yet as the lights dimmed and the film began comparisons to Roald Dahl and other childhood favourites disappeared, as a very different monster awakened. A Monster Calls is the story...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP We have all tried to make a good impression before. Whether it’s a job interview, the first day of school, or meeting a significant other’s parents the prospect can be rather daunting. Why Him? is interested in the latter and follows the old family meets inappropriate boyfriend structure, but this time the premise has been updated to fall in line with today’s standards – or lack of – with crude jokes fitted in at any available...

By Linda Marric @Linda_Marric Taking place some time in between Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), the new movie in Disney’s Star Wars franchise revival is every bit as exhilarating and as thrilling as The Force Awakens. Directed by British director Gareth Edwards (Monsters 2010), Rogue One may not be a fully fledged Star Wars “episode”, but it is however packed-full of all the familiar themes...

By Linda Marric @Linda_Marric Directed and produced by Otto Bell, The Eagle Huntress is a beautifully executed documentary account of how a teenage girl from a nomadic khazkh minority in Mongolia broke thorough a gender barrier upheld by hundreds of years of tradition, to become the first female to ever hunt with a bird of prey on the Altai mountains. Bell used his life savings to fund the film after coming across the story online, relying only on a few...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Sharing the title of D.W Griffith’s 1915 racist ode to The Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy, Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation’s message couldn’t be more different. The film tells the little talked about story of a slave rebellion in 1831 lead by Nat Turner, a literate preacher who was born into slavery and singled out as a child by his master’s wife to learn to read and write. As well as writing and...