• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    May 27, 2015 - By 

    Taking just as many cues from US and European independent cinema as the classic horror canon, first-time feature writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour meticulously crafts a striking new-wave romance, in, what could very well be, the finest vampire flick of the decade. “Vampire romance? Ugh!”, I hear you groan. Rest assured, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is more than the sum of its parts, worlds away from those much-loathed teen melodramas of recent years. Instead, Amirpour presents a dark, postmodern tale of loneliness and desire, set amongst the industrial ghost town of Bad City, Iran. A desolate town sucked…

  • Tomorrowland

    May 26, 2015 - By 

    Brad Bird’s so-far stellar directorial efforts have shown an ability to draw on older forms and attitudes and render them with a fresh, impressive sense of movement and action. Humanist classic The Iron Giant’s story of small-town Americana resisting cold war hysteria was a hand-drawn animation released as the industry barreled towards computer generation. Later, The Incredibles told a superhero family drama in the style of old-glamour spy movies, laced with a critique of the modern world’s low horizons. Tomorrowland, channeling the futurist enthusiasm of Uncle Walt’s original theme park ride, is steeped in the golly-gee wonder of Bird’s Space Age youth, with its jetpacks and rocket ships…

  • Mad Max: Fury Road

    May 18, 2015 - By 

    Stay on the road long enough and your brain starts to cook. It’s been thirty years since we last saw mad Mel’s petrolhead wanderer of the scorched Outback, but Fury Road shows no sign of the entropy or compromise that usually accompany extended hiatuses. The seventy year-old George Miller, who has spent the gap making talking animal films and gingerly trying to get a new Max off the ground, has delivered that rarity: a popcorn blockbuster fuelled by the daring clarity of personal, psychotic vision. With its blistering locomotive energy, Fury Road moves at a different warp-speed to blandly directed…

  • The Canal

    May 12, 2015 - By 

    “Will you watch this film with me? I’m scared to watch it alone,” begs the grieving and quite possibly insane father at the centre of Dublin-set The Canal. Film watching is a risky business in Irish film-maker Ivan Kavanagh’s broadly familiar but effective combination of domestic dread, malignant spirits and dysfunctional paterfamilias. We open on a slice of yuppie fantasy, with film archivist David (Rupert Evans) and his beautiful pregnant wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) meeting an estate agent and cheerfully joyfully agreeing on a lovely townhouse for their burgeoning family unit, a buzzing middle-class aspiration that goes sour. Horror continues…

  • Fast and Furious 7

    April 6, 2015 - By 

    Typically, we love the underdog story. The scrappy young team of misfits and broken toys come together to take on the elite and emerge victorious. The Fast and Furious series is very much an underdog story. From the initial entry, the film got a deserved critical mauling that carried on for the earliest entries. The films were inherently ridiculous but treated themselves with such a po-faced sincerity that much of the fun was derived from the deepest ironic wells. Fortunately the arrival of director Justin Lin helped to curb this. Directing four of the series’ seven entries, Lin not only…

  • Who Am I – No System Is Safe

    March 31, 2015 - By 

    In the pantheon of great films about technology, there are very few members exclusively devoted to coding, even fewer exclusively dealing with hacking. The main films that comes to mind when faced with these parameters are 1995’s Hackers, in which Matthew Lillard plays a skateboarding Pippi Longstocking lookalike, and 2001’s Swordfish, a film which people remember for John Travolta’s goofy facial hair and two other reasons which earned Halle Berry about a million dollars. So when discussing hacking movies, we’re not in good cinematic company. Sadly, Who Am I – No System Is Safe, while a stronger film than many…

  • While We’re Young

    March 25, 2015 - By 

    Two years ago, Noah Baumbach made an absolute treat of a film called Frances Ha. It was an intelligent and emotionally resonant film about Millennials, finding direction in life and the idea of maturity in the modern age; basically a version of Girls wherein you didn’t want every character to hurl themselves into a great big bin. For his next film, While We’re Young, Baumbach wisely has chosen to go back to the same well, albeit with a slightly different viewpoint. This time around, Baumbach shifts the view from people in the early 20s to those in their early 40s.…

  • Cobain: Montage of Heck

    March 22, 2015 - By 

    In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He left behind a wife, an infant daughter and a legacy as one of the last true rock gods. In the intervening 21 years, a messianic persona has been grafted onto this young man from Aberdeen, Washington. His face is plastered on t-shirts and posters the world over to the point where he has become an apolitical Che Guevara for angry misunderstood adolescents to identify with. There is a plethora of retrospective articles, unauthorized biographies and crackpot theories relating to the man, his music and…

  • Catch Me Daddy

    March 18, 2015 - By 

    Lovers on the run, honour killings and bounty hunters form the narrative context for a film that nails its colours firmly to its stunning visuals and visceral soundtrack in Daniel Wolfe’s dark thriller, Catch Me Daddy. Laila (played by superb newcomer Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and boyfriend Aaron are laying low from her possessive father in a small northern town on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, idling away their time walking in the hills, doing drugs and dancing in their tiny caravan. The prosaic beauty of their youthful existence is shattered, however, when Laila’s brother, Zaheer, arrives with some low level…

  • Still Alice

    March 11, 2015 - By 

    There is a deep sense of inevitability to Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Alzheimer’s drama based on Lisa Genova’s novel, a feeling that is only partly down to its heroine’s arc of incurable mental deterioration. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a clever and accomplished linguistic professor whose cosy professional and family life unravels when she is diagnosed with an on-set variation of the disease, one which takes effect with a cruel swiftness. Early on she loses her way in a conference speech, but as the rot accelerates she begins to forget names, appointments, memories and, in the film’s principal, on-the-nose irony, whole…