Film

Like, day festivals and half-naked people the instant the sun comes out, surely outdoor cinema is one of the best things about a London summer. With pop-up screens now proliferating the capital from May through till September it can feel overwhelming picking a pop up. (Overwhelming in a very first world problem sense.) Pop Up Screens offer good options across the capital which are importantly at the regular cinema price of ten pounds. Screens are up in picturesque Greenwich Peninsula,...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel 13 minutes is nothing. It’s a delay on the trains, the length of time it takes to get through adverts in the cinema, a quick walk around the block, a snoozed alarm at dawn. It’s a tiny, insignificant passage of time, the same tiny, insignificant passage of time that Georg Elser missed his target by. Just 13 minutes closer and no more Hitler. It’s impossible to know what the world might have been like had Elser...

By Ben New Marjane Satrapi, writer/director of the multi award winning semi-autobiographical animation Persepolis (2007), has a stab at creating this offbeat quirky comedy scripted by the versatile (and one time Eerie Indiana episode) writer Michael R. Perry. Jerry, played by Ryan Reynolds, is a factory worker who lives alone above a bowling ally. That is except for his pet cat Mr. Whiskers and his dog Bosco who, also voiced by Reynolds, insist on giving him polarising advice and commentary...

By Jack Peat, TLE Editor “You’ll have to excuse my friend”, says Lloyd after his close companion, the dumb to his dumber, sent a coach of women on a bikini tour back to the nearest town in search of two oil boys. “He’s a little slow”. After weeks spent on the road travelling across America to reunite a client with her briefcase only to be dumped by the wealthy Mary Swanson, have their nest egg removed by the cops and...

By Toby Venables @TobyVenables “I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet,” says Back to the Future’s metal-playing Marty McFly to his bemused 1955 audience. “But your kids are gonna love it.” First released as All American High in 1987 to critical acclaim – but with very limited distribution – Keva Rosenfeld’s fly-on-the wall documentary of life at a California high school also seems to have found its time. Now remastered, it incorporates and updates the original, featuring a...

By Matt Keay To call The Happiness of the Katakuris a family drama would be to diminish its heart. To refer to it as a black comedy, however, would be to take away from the baffling and beautiful aspects of a film that contains a subplot of a Japanese confidence man claiming to be the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth II. Takashi Miike’s frankly bonkers 2001 musical/animation/love story/drama deals with the perils of setting up a bed and breakfast where the guests...

By Leslie Byron Pitt, @Afrofilmviewer In terms of adult mainstream cinema, the final quarter of last year was dominated by talk of the gender politics of David Fincher’s slick adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel; Gone Girl. The film, as well as the book, merrily sticks and twists the knife on the uglier side of a decaying relationship. Executed with extravagant twists and perverse cruelty, Gone Girl highlighted the battle of the sexes the only way America wants to these days,...

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)...