Film Reviews

By Michael McNulty From the minute Pierce Brosnan’s face appears in medium close up in the first scene and he utters the words “I’m sorry, truly, because I fucked up” it almost feels like he could be apologising to the viewer for what they are about to endure. This scene and the rest of Lessons in Love is as about as convincing as Pierce Brosnan was playing James Bond. It’s a mishmash of poorly written, averagely filmed, unconvincing scenes that...

By Leslie Byron Pitt @Afrofilmviewer Wim Winders Oscar nominated feature The Salt of the Earth is a remarkably timely feature, which highlights the work of social photographer Sebastiao Salgado. The film details Salgado's powerful imagery of refugees from all over the world from the sands of Sudan to the Gold Mines of Serra Pelada. The film is light on many elements within his photography, with much of Salgado's footage is of dead or dying persons, and the film only scratching...

By Adam Turner @AdamTurnerPR July Jung's dark drama, A Girl at My Door, explores the troubled lives of two forlorn souls living in a sleepy fishing village in South Korea. Young-nam (Doona Bae) is a dejected police academy officer who has been transferred from Seoul to Yeosu after an unexplained 'police misconduct'. Much to her surprise, she becomes a knight in shining armour to Dohee's (Kim Sae Ron), a local teenager whose life is riddled with torment and misery. In...

By Ben New @squareleg A man wakes up, his alarm didn’t go off. He moves to the kitchen, the taps aren’t working. A glance out the window to a neighboring block reveals someone banging at a window, calling for help. We try to leave and the door is glued shut then comes the sledgehammer whacks from one of the neighbor‘s wall, the whole time accompanied from insistent shouting from the elderly neighbor from the other. This is the very intriguing...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada How to Change the World looks back on the early days of Greenpeace, when the organisation was a small, motley crew of environmental activists from Vancouver. With a keen eye for opportunities to generate media attention, they brought a common cause to the emerging environmental movement: thousands of people joined the call to “save the whales”. But the original group itself fell apart to give way to what would become the global organisation that Greenpeace is...

By Michael McNulty An intense, thrilling piece of frontline film-making. Cartel Land’s in the thick of it, run and gun, handheld cinematography is enough to enjoy on its own. The film opens in the middle of the Mexican desert in the dead of the night as a group of cartel members cook up a batch of meth. One admits, as thick white smoke swirls in the black around them, that what they are doing is wrong, but that if they...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Paula Bélier is the 17-old-daughter of a cheese farming family in rural France. Early in the morning, she and her younger brother help on the farm, before she cycles to the village to get on the bus that takes her to school in the nearest town. On the bus, she handles all of her family's business phone calls: She is the only hearing person in her family. Both her parents and her brother are deaf.  ...

By Ellery Nick @Ellery_Nick Director Anton Corbijn takes us back to 1950s Los Angeles where a photographer is pursuing a debutante actor on the cusp of stardom. With a little luck that golden quiffed kid might just be his ticket away from snapping starlets on red carpets and back to good ol’New York where being a creative means something.   And so Dennis Stock tries to pin down the elusive James Dean. Both are young artists who share a similar...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel So often in 45 Years a crescendo beckons, and just as often Andrew Haigh steps nimbly away. His third feature, a superb achievement, is far too accomplished a creation to sully the relationship at the heart of proceedings with something as crass as a blunt emotional punchline. This is an altogether more complex and rewarding experience, one that asks a hell of a lot of its two leads, and receives even more in return. The first...