• True Story

    July 28, 2015 - By 

    The last time James Franco and Jonah Hill were in a movie together, 2013’s This is the End, Hill got a Satanic cock up the ass and Franco was munched to death by self-appointed cannibal king Danny McBride. Franco and Hill trade up in the respectability index for True Story, a flat cat-and-mouse two-hander based on the ‘true story’ of Christian Longo, wanted by the FBI in 2002 for the murder of his family, and the disgraced journalist who wrote a book about him. Hill is Michael Finkel, an ambitious New York Times reporter who is fired for embellishing a cover story on modern slavery and…

  • Station to Station

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Doug Aitken’s Station To Station – a collagist multimedia project spanning numerous major US cities and “off-the-grid” locations – is an unusual experience. Recorded over a three-week, four-thousand mile trip in late 2013, Aitken’s film encapsulates all manner of experiences and ethea in relation to being on the road in a contemporary America. Filmed on-board and around a customised, neon-coated train, and through a series of live “happenings”, Station To Station is at once frenetic and contemplative, not only in its content, but also its kaleidoscopic structure. Collaborators range from world-renowned musicians (Patti Smith, Jackson Browne, Beck), to experimental artists…

  • Eden

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Eden is a cautionary tale based on the life of director Mia Hansen-Love’s brother Sven and shows the dizzying highs and soul-destroying lows of Paul (Felix de Givry) and his uniformly charmless friends in the 90s Garage House scene in Paris. Paul is really only the protagonist through the sheer amount of time we spend with him. He sort of bubbles up through the ranks through sheer ubiquity, his friends, similar pouters in knitwear, seem no more or less attractive than he does. We’re just stuck with him for two and a half hours. This, perversely, is one of the…

  • Ant-Man

    July 23, 2015 - By 

    Ant-Man is a small guy but he comes with a lot of baggage. With the high-profile mid-production replacement of Edgar Wright, a stylistically idiosyncratic film-maker with cult buzz, with Yes Man director Peyton Redd, much of the nerdtariat has already pegged Ant-Man as a test case for the limits of auteurism in the Marvel factory. And the pint-sized adventures of Scott Lang, Paul Rudd’s incredible shrinking superhero and the latest addition to the Avengers fringes, definitely invites this perspective. The film is immediately readable as a kind of Rorschach test, with tone, story and character work that stretches from inspired to…

  • The Burning

    June 29, 2015 - By 

    Looking over the last decade or so, we as a culture seem to be falling back in love with the Western. Between John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the Western is coming back in a very vivid and eclectic way. Each of these films, and most recent Westerns of this ilk, seem to actively want to make a comment on our society, be it moral relativism, the fundamentally nihilistic nature of the world or the centuries old roots of Ferguson and Baltimore. This all neatly leads us to The Burning,…

  • The Look of Silence

    June 25, 2015 - By 

    Joshua Oppenheimer won the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2014, primarily off the back of his 2012 effort The Act of Killing, a brutal and genuinely disturbing masterpiece . The film was about the 1965 Indonesian military coup, the subsequent genocides in which over a million people were murdered and the nation that Indonesia became having been run by the men who committed these acts of killing. It was a film that asked the perpetrators of these acts to reenact them, all of whom did with a worrying glee, in order to help us understand the cultural mindscape of the nation…

  • Entourage

    June 22, 2015 - By 

    Entourage isn’t really a movie. It’s a feature-length wrap-up of the massively successful HBO show of the same name, which told the story of a group of bromantic friends from Queens who live the high life in la-la-land when the beautiful one gets tapped for stardom. Loosely based on the banter of producer Mark Wahlberg and his buddies, the show combined a lightly-worn underdog spirit with glossy lifestyle porn. The film is, as everyone has pointed out, basically a bunch of TV episodes strung together, a fist-bumping victory lap for the already-smug. In basic story-telling terms, nothing really happens: there’s no arc, no development, no…

  • Jurassic World

    June 15, 2015 - By 

    No recent blockbuster is so visibly animated by the anxiety of influence as Jurassic World. Coming 14 years after the last inter-species tête-à-tête, and nearly a quarter of a century after the magisterial original, Spielberg’s franchise has been dug out of amber and reanimated for a new generation. Now three sequels in, Jurassic World gestures to its cinematic parent with a half-embarrassed mixture of deference and dread, prodding audience nostalgia with riffs on iconic images while offering a surprisingly self-reflexive commentary on its own bland, sell-out pillaging of that first-time wonder. Two decades after the park’s initial teething problems, the…

  • Timbuktu

    June 7, 2015 - By 

    In the world right now, there is a cultural war unfolding. It’s a conflict of moderation against militancy as ordinary Muslims try to sustain their way of life in the face of violence and campaign of fear in the form of ISIS, whose commitment to brutality may well be one of the most legitimately terrifying elements of contemporary society. The group hold a unique position; by flooding the news with hyper-flashy, well edited YouTube videos of their barbarity, they’ve ensured their constant presence on television screens and on and offline publications globally. This monstrous self-promotion has put any kind of…

  • Heaven Adores You

    June 5, 2015 - By 

    I was slumping about in my mid-teenage years, feeling a bit lost and misunderstood, when I first was introduced to Elliott Smith. One listen of XO and I fell in love hard. Elliott Smith’s magic lies in creating the delicately beautiful and achingly bittersweet. He is, at once, the perfect and worst thing to listen to if you’re heartbroken, melancholy or just feeling a bit overcast. And, let’s be honest, any fan worth their salt has knowingly (almost masochistically) reached for one of his albums when at a low, in the full comprehension of what will follow. He is the…