Search results for: “label/Ben Nicholson”
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DVD Review: Mysterious Object at Noon
★★★★☆ The construction of a narrative may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one considers the beguiling cinema of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Indeed, such matters seem irrelevant and even a little uncouth when contemplating his particular form of poetic transcendence – but when ‘Joe’ started out, the construction of narrative…
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Film Review: ‘Kill Your Friends’
★★☆☆☆ Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) came under heavy fire from some quarters for not being strident enough in its disavowal of the behaviour of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. There’s a very fine line between portraying outrageous behaviour and skewed morality in the hopes of highlighting its grotesquerie, and relenting to its…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn’
★★★☆☆ Liv Corfixen’s My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2014) starts from the unfortunate position of being wide open to comparison with another behind-the-scenes peek, Eleanor Coppola’s Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). Where that film followed the incredible disasters that befell Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) shoot, this documents the far…
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Special Feature: BFI presents Věra Chytilová
“Form seemed to have gone rigid.” Few sentences or sentiments could better encapsulate the climate in which Věra Chytilová, Queen of the Czech New Wave, forged her boundary-pushing directorial career – or the spunky attitude with which she approached her craft. Perhaps most fittingly, they are her own words. Even before her cinematic education, she…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Faust’
★★★★★ F.W. Murnau was a director who fused the sweeping atmosphere of silent film, with a visual poetry all of his very own and in doing so crafted some of the most incredible films ever made. Before heading to Hollywood in the late 1920s – where he would make the sensational Sunrise (1927) – his…
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Film Review: ‘Summer in February’
★★☆☆☆ Hoping, no doubt, to capitalise on the recent international success of ITV’s Downton Abbey and other successful historical dramas on the big screen comes Christopher Menaul’s Summer in February (2013). Adapted by Jonathan Smith from his own novel, this is a fictionalised account of a period of high emotions and scandal in the bohemian…
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Film Review: ‘The Great Hip Hop Hoax’
★★★☆☆ In the mid-noughties, hip-hop outfit Silibil n’ Brains arrived in London from California with the dream of conquering the British music industry. At their first gig, their energy and humour got them spotted by a label and they had soon signed to a highly influential manager. Recording space was promptly arranged and hype had…
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DVD Review: ‘Good Vibrations’
★★★☆☆ Directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn have defied the conventional sobriety of a film about ‘the Troubles’ in their Belfast-set music biopic, Good Vibrations (2012). Without shying away from the darker aspects of the city in the 1970s, their story is concerned with one man who believed music could make a difference in…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Birth of a Nation’
★★★★★ It would be something of an understatement to label D.W. Griffith’s American Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), as controversial. The film became infamous due to its overt racism and negative stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans, coupled with the rampant glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, causing widespread outcry. Such was the…
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Special Feature: ‘Directory of World Cinema: South Korea’
It would perhaps be overstating it to claim that South Korean cinema had been invisible in the West before the second instalment of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy. Cannes contender Oldboy (2003) was, however, a well-placed hammer blow to the floodgates. Since then, international interest in the nation’s cinema has grown exponentially and has introduced European…
