Film Reviews

By Ellery Nick @Ellery_Nick After the success of Red Violin and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould director François Girard returns once more to the realm of music, this time accompanied by a choir of young male sopranos. Along for the harmonic capers is a supporting cast that includes Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates and Eddie Izzard. Safe hands all round. View image | gettyimages.com We know how this one goes: Talented boy from wrong side of the tracks enters...

Reviewed by Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada If The Wonders is a coming-of-age story, it is a very tender one. Teenager Gelsomina lives with her parents, three younger sisters, and aunt in a dilapidated farm building in rural Italy. They are a family of beekeepers, living a simple traditional life and struggling to raise the means to modernise their production room to keep up with new health and safety regulations. They are ostensibly poor, but not suffering. The father Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck)...

By Adam Clark @AdamClarkers Jurassic World flips from nought to preposterous far too quickly and in doing so leaves behind any of the thoughtfulness of the original Jurassic Park. There might be an argument for allowing the film to stand on its own two feet except for the fact that the film itself is so desperate to crowbar in as many callbacks as possible. Rather than reboot the series, it’s set up as a sequel in the near future. Jurassic...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Everyone's Going To Die: an unusual name for an aptly unusual film. The debut film of intriguing British Director Collective Jones EGTD is an offbeat "romantic comedy", the words rom-com being said in VERY large inverted commas. This is genre-bending stuff, no simple heart-warming, or syrupy endings here. The rom-com element is reminiscent of Lost in Translation in that the romance is all about what does not, or has not yet happened. The moments before, the...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada What would happen if a middle-class woman in London were pregnant with the second coming of Jesus via immaculate conception? If Debbie Tucker Green's The Second Coming is to be believed, nothing much. There'd be an argument with the husband, a best friend worrying about her mental condition, and the woman in question refusing to talk to anyone about it. A synopsis, in most cases, does not tell you the whole story of the film, it...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Kajaki is based on the true story of  a group of soldiers, who in 2006 whilst on a routine expedition of the Kajaki dam in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, stumbled right into a minefield. What followed in reality was five hours of hell as the men waited on rescuing helicopters. One by one the mines activated leaving seven of the men severely injured, (blown off limbs and punctured lungs), whilst the remaining uninjured men attempted to calm...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Monet, Renoir, Cézanne – today, these painters' and their fellow Impressionists' works are as ubiquitous and well-known as it gets, adorning calendars, mugs and coasters. But of course at the time these young artists started painting in their now recognizable style, they caused quite the stir in the art world and were seen as an abomination by the establishment. Their transformation into respectable artists was not least due to the art collector and dealer Paul Durand-Ruel....

By Ellery Nick @Ellery_Nick James corrects his older brother, ‘It’s not Jimmy anymore, its James.’ Reluctantly, Frankie accepts this and we take James’s point. He wants to be taken seriously. Frankie and Jimmy? This isn’t some toothpick-chewing bank robbery yarn set in the Big Easy after all. In American Heist, Hayden Christensen plays muscle-car driving James, who is less than thrilled about older brother Frankie’s return from prison after managing to pull his socks up and re-enter the civilised world...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Saved from triteness (just) by Al Pacino's utterly gratifiying, larger than life performance, Danny Collins takes as its springboard the story of folk musician Steve Tilston who received a letter from John Lennon thirty five years too late. In an interview with a music magazine Tilston had expressed some fear over the potentially corrupting power of the riches and fame integral to the rock-star trajectory.  Lennon took issue with this and wrote to then twenty one...