Short of the Week – The Wolf and the Wayfarer Bertie Archer April 17, 2017 Features, Independent, Short of the Week https://vimeo.com/mkamal/wolfscreener Set within the breathtaking Sequoia National Park, a vast unblemished paradise of trees, hills and glades, The Wolf and the Wayfarer is a stunning piece. As beautiful...
10 Most Exciting Cannes Competition Films 2017 Calum Baker April 14, 2017 Analysis, Features, Top 10 Last year's Cannes Film Festival was a real crowdpleaser in terms of headline names: Jim Jarmusch and Nicolas Winding Refn each blew us away, Jeff Nichols made a slow-burning stonker, and Asghar Farhadi...
How One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Mastered the Art of Adaptation Calum Baker April 13, 2017 Analysis, By The Book, Features Adaptations: they're never as good as the book. Lord of the Rings purists would mostly agree, and though Ang Lee and Emma Thompson did an Oscar-winning number on Sense and Sensibility, there's no way any of...
Scene Stealers: Jason Statham in Fast & Furious 7 Joni Blyth April 12, 2017 Analysis, Features, Scene Stealers It's tough to claim one cast member of Fast & Furious 7 as the definitive scene-stealer. The whole franchise is really just a scenery-chewing contest, a metatextual battle of bravado, and the competition...
A Look Inside Mulholland Drive’s Troubling Heart of Darkness Patrick Nabarro April 11, 2017 Features Mulholland Drive (2001) has been lauded across the board since its release 15 years ago. It was even voted the best film of the 21st century so far in a much-publicised BBC Culture poll of 2016. Indeed, the...
Short of the Week – Mend and Make Do Ersin Ali April 10, 2017 Features, Independent, Short of the Week https://vimeo.com/209115026 When looking backwards in time it is easy to wryly smile at the use of the phrase 'Back in my day' or 'When I was younger...'. These clichés, denote something humorous about...
Why The House of Mirth is Terence Davies’ Most Underrated Film Patrick Nabarro April 5, 2017 Features A Quiet Passion is not only the title of the Emily Dickinson biopic that comes out on general release this weekend. It could also be a fitting epigraph for the ethos of its diligent and artful director,...
La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Tarkovsky’s Reinvention of the Femme Fatale in Solaris Patrick Nabarro April 4, 2017 Analysis, Close-Up, Features In John Keats’ haunting poem about the elusiveness of perfect love, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (translation: "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy"), the poem’s main conduit, the Knight, recounts a...
A Brief History of Whitewashing in Film Eddie Falvey April 3, 2017 Analysis, Close-Up, Features Word is out that Netflix's Marvel universe has finally dropped the ball with Iron Fist, a lacklustre attempt to raise a middling character from obscurity. Likewise, if our word is anything to go by – and,...
Short of the Week – A Mighty Nice Man Louise Burrell April 3, 2017 Features, Independent, Short of the Week https://vimeo.com/209597030 Based on Patricia Highsmith’s book of the same name, HBO-backed A Mighty Nice Man tells the eerie story of a little girl’s loss of innocence. When Charlotte and her...
Second Chance: Sharlto Copley in Chappie Phil W. Bayles March 30, 2017 Features, Nostalgia, Second Chance When Neill Blomkamp burst onto the scene in 2009 with his blisteringly brilliant debut film District 9, he brought someone else with him: actor Sharlto Copley, whose entirely improvised performance as nebbish...
Was Scarlett Johansson the Right Choice for Ghost in the Shell? Kambole Campbell March 29, 2017 Analysis, Debate, Features The second release this month that has received a savage backlash from social media based on its casting of a white protagonist, the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Rupert Sanders' adaptation of Ghost in...
Why A Field in England is Ben Wheatley’s Best Film Jack Blackwell March 28, 2017 Analysis, Features, Opinion From Down Terrace to the soon-to-be-released Free Fire, Ben Wheatley has cemented his reputation as one of the most celebrated and interesting voices in British cinema of the last decade. Starting with...
Short of the Week – Night Fishing L D March 27, 2017 Features, Independent, Short of the Week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRlqPQ7dAw&t=267s Made with his brother Chan-kyong, Park Chan-wook's cacophonous avant-garde short journeys into the spirit world to explore notions of embodiment and...
10 Kids’ TV Shows That Need Gritty Reboots Calum Baker March 23, 2017 Analysis, Features, Top 10 What a time to be alive. Bryan Cranston, 25 years and six Emmys after playing "Snizzard" in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, is returning to the franchise reboot as the all-new ultra-realistic Zordon. The...
