• Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise

    November 6, 2016 - By 

    Experimentation has never frightened Mark Cousins. He doesn’t cling to form and narrative the Eway many filmmakers and most of us mere mortals do, instead he challenges the medium and the audience. In Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise he has created a kaleidoscopic visual history of the atomic age that is part music video, part documentary, part avant-garde film, part dream and part nightmare. Accompanied by an illuminating and introspective score from Mogwai, that gives an even greater resonance to the film’s images, the result is pure cinema. Created in 2015 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombings…

  • The Blue Room

    September 26, 2016 - By 

    Best known for his performances in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Quantum of Solace and Venus in Fur, Mathieu Amalric steps behind the camera to adapt Georges Simenon’s novel of the same name. The story of an extra-marital affair that leads to a double murder investigation, The Blue Room is an immaculately crafted, neo-noir character study, both haunting and illuminating in equal measure. The film begins with the two lovers, Julien and Esther, naked in bed. Immediately there is a disjuncture between sound and image as the audience hears them have sex, but never sees it. Only the eponymous…

  • Cinema 16 For 16: Victoria

    April 4, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. One city. One night. One take. So reads the tagline for Victoria, the new film from relatively unknown director Sebastian Schipper that has cinephiles the world over going all googly eyed. It’s the ‘one take’ from the tagline that is especially capturing attention- with the film…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Goodnight Mommy

    March 15, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. One of the most hyped European horror films for some time, Goodnight Mommy, finally arrives on these shores amid some glowing, ‘caution, not for the faint-hearted’ reviews. Austria’s entry in the 88th Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film category, which is some going for a horror…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Hitchcock/Truffaut

    March 7, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. Hitchcock. You barely need to say anything else. In fact, you don’t need to say anything at all, you could just scribble Hitch’s nine stroke signature line drawing – a caricature of the director in profile. No director has cast such a long shadow over the…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Secret In Their Eyes

    February 25, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to; rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. ‘Hollywood remake’ is a somewhat tainted term, for every The Birdcage there’s an Old Boy. But in this much maligned time of endless sequels and franchises that reboot like a skipping record, isn’t it better to take a brilliant foreign film and try to reimagine it…

  • Cinema 16 For 16: Bone Tomahawk

    February 23, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to; rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. After a fallow period of two movies in eight years, Kurt Russell returns to the silver screen in a second western- this one with a liberal dose of horror- in two months with Bone Tomahawk, the first film from writer-director, S. Craig Zahler. While The Hateful…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Janis: Little Girl Blue

    February 17, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to; rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. Documentary filmmaker Amy Berg (West of Memphis, Prophet’s Prey) turns her investigative camera inwards onto the all too brief life of rock icon Janis Joplin for her new film, Janis: Little Girl Blue, profiling not just the career of one of rock music’s first and still…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: A Bigger Splash

    February 16, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. The sun-kissed Mediterranean, The Rolling Stones, four of the hottest actors in cinema and a story of desire, jealousy and deceit. A Bigger Splash sees Tilda Swinton reunite with director Luca Guadagnino – the two previously collaborated on I Am Love – to rework Jacques Deray’s…

  • Oscars 2016: Will Leo Finally be the King of the World?

    February 2, 2016 - By 

    New year, new awards season, same old Hollywood. The 88th Academy Awards ceremony takes place on 28th February and, post-Golden Globes, pre-BAFTAs, we’re smack bang in the middle of the media storm, but the storylines seem oddly familiar. Much like the remakes, reboots and sequels that dominate the box office, the Oscars seem to be recycling old plot lines – could JJ Abrams be producing it perchance? Even before the nominations were announced there was one story that was dominating the awards agenda – is this Leo’s year? In a re-run of the 2013 Oscars, everyone is desperate for the…