Film

By Sam Inglis  @24fpsUK  24fps.org.uk Catch Me Daddy begins slowly, drawing a portrait of separate lives, all of which seem to be lived on the margins of society. As the first half hour runs on we see that we're following two sides of a story; a criminal gang and the two teenagers they are looking for. Initially I assumed that what had got Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and Aaron (Connor McCarron) in trouble was some kind of debt, but it...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film '71 is a darkly disturbing, intensely evocative, riveting portrayal of a young soldier's experience of war, in the bitterest of conflicts, that of the Northern Ireland troubles. Jack O'Connell (Starred Up) is rapidly emerging as the actor of his generation with his elliptical, highly emotive performance as private Gary Hook, an army new recruit from small town Derbyshire. From children's home to army barracks, his first posting sees his troop rerouted to Belfast due to increasing...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan is a tale of rot and corruption in modern day Russia that is as brittle and barren as the skeletal Whale carcass beached on the shore of this remote northwestern Russian town. Unforgiving and relentless, the film’s darkness is offset by exquisite raucous vodka-drenched banter of the kind that provokes laughter and blushes in equal measure. A rough re-working of the Old Testament’s Book of Job, it tells the story of Kolya (Alexei...

Reviewed by Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada A village in Ethiopa, 1996. As 14 year old Hirut is walking home from school, she is kidnapped by a group of young armed men. One of the men rapes her and leaves her to sleep on the floor of his house. She has fallen victim to a tradition still observed in rural Ethiopia at the time: Men kidnap and rape girls they want to marry, overthrowing the family’s refusal to give their daughter in...

By Matt Keay @MattAdamKeay In the opening minutes of Gerard Johnson’s sophomore effort, Hyena, the audience is presented with a bravura neon-lit nighttime raid, set against foreboding music, a sense of dread permeating the screen. The men they see appear to be policeman, but they are so far removed from the friendly beat bobbies the majority of the public recognise that they could be forgiven for expecting their uniforms to be some sort of disguise; a ruse for nefarious criminal...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Kim Longinotto's documentary Dreamcatcher has I suspect used up my full years supply of tears. Longinotto is an almost entirely silent presence behind the camera, which feels right for the stories she documents; giving, ex-prostitute and current Dreamcatcher Foundation advocate Brenda Myers-Powell, as well as the numerous women Brenda supports, the space to tell their own stories. The Dreamcatcher Foundation, as their site states fights to end human sex trafficking in Chicago. And the stories told...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle I haven’t laughed so much at a movie since Withnail and I. Not that Appropriate Behaviour is exactly of Withnail’s ilk, it is as the elevator pitch goes: a mix between Frances Ha and Annie Hall. Yet the realistic hilarity and absurdity of the characters struggles are that of Withnail’s, (very high), standard. Like contemporaries Lena Dunham and Miranda July, Desiree Akhavan’s art is of the personal-to-the- point-of-over-sharing kind, and Dunham is unsurprisingly already a big...

A list of the top 15 greatest ever TV shows has been compiled by Sky Atlantic with Breaking Bad and the Big Bang Theory both landing in the top 5.  It seems we could be living in a second Golden Age of television with eight of the top 15 TV shows made in the past ten years. Along with Breaking Bad and the Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones landed in seventh place beating time-honoured British classic Doctor Who, which finished...

By Anna Power @TLE_Film The Imitation Game comes to Blu-ray and DVD from 9th March, 2015, courtesy of StudioCanal. See below to win a copy on Blu Ray. A simple story about a complicated man, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), the Cambridge mathematician whose unquantifiable contribution to the decoding of Enigma, is a story previously unheralded on screen before The Imitation Game. Based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, the film faithfully portrays the complexity of Turing’s...