Film

Review by Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Quoting Homer and repairing garages while flashing his biceps, Noah seems like the perfect distraction for the super-glamourous high school teacher Claire (Jennifer Lopez). She has recently kicked her cheating husband out of her house, but not quite out of her life. Noah, the titular boy next door, is an allegedly 19 year old hunk with a passion for the more violent episodes of the Iliad and great abs, played by visibly 27 year old...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel  thefinalreel.co.uk A week on and the dust is settling on the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival. As ever with the Berlinale, this edition mixed the sublime with the ridiculous in a programme so large unwitting critics have been known to lose sense of direction and never emerge again. So what did this February film bonanza bring? By all accounts a worthy winner in the shape of Jafar Panahi’s Taxi. The acclaimed Iranian filmmaker whose previous effort...

By Leslie Byron Pitt @Afrofilmviewer afrofilmviewer.com Nowadays I find myself, much more compelled to revisit the latest features of Cronenberg as opposed to his more explicit shock flicks that appeared earlier in his career. My main reason for this I feel is, as a director, Cronenberg has elevated his themes of body horror, carnal pleasures, and creative enterprise gone awry, to its peak. His love the viral and transfer of fluids hasn’t left him, however, while his films had a more...

By Emily Wight About halfway through Maidan, a man climbs up the side of a disused bus with its windows smashed and seats wrenched off their hinges, and yells at the sea of riot police lined up behind it: “Are you people or animals?” None of them respond, but with explosions and chants roaring through the air, they may well not have heard. If it were to have emerged from Syria or Iraq over the past few years, footage like...

By Sam Inglis @24fpsUK 24fps.org.uk Kumiko The Treasure Hunter starts out by telling us it's a true story, but it does so in a unique way. The caption comes from another film, Fargo, which was lying in its caption. It's the beginning of an interesting relationship between this film and the 'truth'. Kumiko is based on the true story of a Japanese woman who was found dead in North Dakota in 2001. She had frozen to death after searching for...

By Sam Inglis @24fpsUK  24fps.org.uk  The horror genre has always been one for hybrids, both in terms of what it depicts and how it uses generic convention. The thing is, combining two ideas that work in isolation, interesting as the concept may be, doesn't always lead to a third great thing. That seems to be what has happened with Spring. You have to applaud the daring and originality of the concept; filtering Before Sunrise through a Cronenbergian monster movie is...

By Emma Siverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle From its opaque start through to its ambiguous denouncement Robin Campillo's Eastern Boys is a brilliantly complex exploration of power dynamics. In the opening scenes, the Eastern Boys, (hailing from the Ukraine, Russia and Romania), roam the Gare Du Nord, their purpose and intention unclear but their sense of pack protection obvious. Yet as the film progresses this sense of immigrant solidarity quickly darkens and shifts to something more akin to captivity than camaraderie. The leader...

By Matt Keay @mattadamkeay It’s extremely rare that a film endowed with large amounts of fizzing and controversial column inches can ever live up to the hype. John Carter, Dark Shadows, and American Hustle recently suffered from this phenomenon, but for a completely different reason than The Interview. The hype surrounding most films might concern the star-studded cast, or the jaw-dropping visual effects, but in the case of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s most recent satirical car crash, it is...

Review by Miranda Schiller Pierre Dulaine is a world champion of ballroom dancing. He was born in Jaffa, but like many Palestinians, his family fled in 1948. In 2011, Dulaine returns to his hometown for the first time, and with an ambitious project. He wants to give dancing lessons to school children and have Jewish and Palestinian children dance together. He strongly believes in the power of dance to overcome prejudice, teach people to respect themselves and each other, to...