Film

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Clint Eastwood has never been for messing around. His 34th film as director opens looking up the barrel at a bulky Bradley Cooper, and down the scope at a mother and child Cooper’s Chris Kyle is going to have to kill. American Sniper seems an unashamedly patriotic film, sometimes painfully so, but it’s also much subtler than that. Kyle is a patriotic warrior driven beyond sensible limits to serve his country, and it nearly destroys him...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle As the year that marks the centenary of World War One comes to a close the expected glut of films documenting that period has not manifest. James Kent and Juliette Towhidi’s adaptation of Vera Brittain’s doorstop of a memoir Testament of Youth standing alone as the most high profile WW1 film of the year. The film is a tear-jerker, has some lovely moments visually, (one scene that was particularly striking was a shot of a Paul...

By Kit Power  Film Editor @TLE_Film Following on from his success with Dallas Buyers Club Jean-Marc Vallee directs Wild, a tale of grief, hurt and healing, literally one step at a time. Reece Witherspoon gives a striking performance as novice, lone-hiker Cheryl Strayed (based on her memoir) who undertook the precipitous 1,100 mile journey through the wilderness as the ill-thought-through solution to a car-crash rock bottom, resulting in the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent divorce. Donning freshly pressed hiking...

By Corrina Antrobus @corrinacorrina There are twists in Foxcatcher that go beyond what we know of the true story of Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz and his relationship with millionaire coach John du Pont. Steve Carell with a huge prosthetic nose puppeteering Channing Tatum in a leotard and a face like a rucksack, sounds like a recipe for a naff comedy. However Foxcatcher, directed by Bennett Miller, is a tender, rich and incredibly sad drama with a throbbing sinister vein. If...

By Stephen Mayne  @finalreel On 28th November 1979, Air New Zealand sightseeing flight 901 crashed into Mount Erebus in Antarctica killing all 257 people on board. The fourth deadliest crash in history at the time, the subsequent retrieval mission set the template for the grisly job of air crash recovery. Erebus: Into the Unknown focusses on this operation, offering an occasionally interesting account hampered by a SparkNotes approach and half-hearted forays into conspiracy territory. Director Charlotte Purdy’s documentary is interested...

 Review by Stephen Mayne @finalreel For all the celebrities walking the Lido at the Venice Film Festival last year, it was (then) 84 year old documentary maker Frederick Wiseman who received the biggest applause. Heading in to collect his lifetime achievement award, he was met by a spontaneous standing ovation from usually flinty critics standing along the way. National Gallery, his latest film, demonstrates for the umpteenth time in a career stretching back half a century just why it was...

By Sam Inglis  @24FPSUK  The only interesting thing about Dying of the Light is its production history. Initially the screenplay by Paul Schrader was to be directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and star Harrison Ford and Channing Tatum. Some years later, the project has come to fruition with Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin, which feels like more than a small step down. The delay and change in casting appears to have been only the start of behind the scenes ructions....

By Anna Power  Film Editor @Tle_Film @KittKino Not since Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life has there been a more palpable portrayal of a mental breakdown than Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman. It’s a film with wings that soars, thunders and ultimately roars as an unapologetic assault on the senses. Michael Keaton plays faded star Riggan in this sharp, blackest of black comedies that finds him attempting to rekindle his career by putting on a Broadway play. Some people have a monkey...

By Stephen Mayne  @finalreel Once upon a time, a new Tim Burton film was an event worth paying attention to. Then, after a string of disappointing gothic tinged fantasies that began to border on parodying his earlier work, they became something best ignored. Big Eyes, an admirable attempt to try something different, doesn’t end the rut. Demonstrating restraint to the point of dullness, barring a woefully misjudged performance from Christoph Waltz, it’s a lifeless and overly simplistic biopic of artist...