Film

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...

By Sam Inglis @24fpsuk  David Cronenberg used to have a lot of nicknames; Dave Deprave, the Baron of Blood, the King of Venereal Horror. These have been used less and less as his work has, especially in the last two decades, become more outwardly cerebral, but even in his goriest work Cronenberg was always a thoughtful filmmaker, and that's certainly something you can see in Rabid. As the film opens Rose (Marilyn Chambers) and her boyfriend Hart (Frank Moore) are...

By Corrina Antrobus @corrinacorrina Love Is Strange does well to name itself as a statement over a question as this film makes no attempt to answer the rhetoric of what love actually is, instead choosing to subtly peer at its many shades. Ira Sachs directs the long-term, newly-wed couple Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) who find themselves in a pickle when their recent marriage means George is sacked. George was a music teacher in a Catholic school and...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle  Not to proverbial on smaller animators but at a time when there’s so many brilliant feature animations, a la Frozen, The Lego Movie, nearly everything Studio Ghibli’s made, the flaws of this one appear extra ugly. Fairytale: Story of The Seven Dwarfs is probably fine for very small children but that’s all. I love a new spin on an old fairy tale, which is what directors Boris Aljinovic and Harald Siepermann attempt but mostly fail to...

By Clarisse Loughrey @Clarisselou The cultural consensus has been slowly letting the bar drop on rom-coms for years now. In some strange parallel to Two Night Stand’s own recently dumped lead, whose all-consuming sexual frustration leads her to pursue the very first dude who doesn’t reply to her online dating messages with “sup girl?”, the very existence of a rom-com which doesn’t come across as outwardly offensive to our core ideals somehow feels like a cinematic triumph. That is to...