James Cameron is a genius. This may be a controversial statement, but it is true in two separate ways. Firstly, he is actually a highly intelligent human being who is, as well as being holder of a couple of patents, is a talented artist and quite probably possesses a genius level IQ. Secondly, he is…
Some films really take you by surprise. They creep up on you, seemingly out of nowhere, and defy any expectations you originally had. This is what it was like for me when I first watched director Philip Martin’s utterly brilliant reimagining of one of Agatha Christie’s most famous stories – Murder on the Orient Express.…
This nasty and offensive little horror film centres around a woman with postnatal depression. The depression gets worse, she has a psychotic breakdown, then tries to murder all her children. At one point we see her stab to death one of her little boys with the handle of a mirror, blood splashing onto her face.…
Vindictive. Exploitive. Malicious. Audacious. Psychotic. Neurotic. Subversive. Oppressive. Impressive. Disturbing. Outstanding?…Perhaps. Pointless?….Perhaps. For esoteric and darring director Michael Haneke’s American based revamp of his own cult-classic does pack a punch, but why remake our own film? Why not. Another question, though- how does a violent film with no on-screen violence obtain an 18 certificate in…
Adapted from Blake Nelson’s best selling novel and shot masterfully in director Gus Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Paranoid Park hinges on an act of acute violence. Alex (Gabe Nevins) is a confused schoolboy skater whose life hits the bricks following his role in the death of a local security guard. The film itself, then,…
Everyone (well, very nearly everyone) loves Christmas and Disney, so we thought the perfect way to launch a new series of film competitions for The Edge would be to team up with The Walt Disney Company and offer a DVD of Avengers Assemble and a PS3 game of Disney/Pixar’s Brave as a prize for one…
“Which is the greatest action movie ever?” Andrew Ovenden puts up an impassioned case for Die Hard.
Anonymous tells a ‘what if?’ story about Shakespeare. Apparently he didn’t write his plays. They were authored by the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), and Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) was actually a stupid promiscuous and gullible idiot who was paid to put his name to them. The plays and poems were then all proof-read and edited…
Good viewing doesn’t always mean happy viewing, and this is something to bear in mind when watching Longford (2006), an underrated masterpiece directed by Tom Hooper and written by Peter Morgan. Hooper, of course, went on to win an Oscar for his film The King’s Speech, and Morgan is famous for writing various successes such…
Because I am strange and get very obsessive about the world of cinema, I sometimes watch films for odd reasons. I chose to watch The Life Before Her Eyes because James Horner wrote the music. His scores have the power to weave a curtain of quality around a film that’s actually rather mediocre (Titanic, Avatar…
Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, two documentary filmmakers from New York, decided in 2010 to make a film charting the burgeoning friendship between Ariel’s brother, Yaniv, and Abby, an eight-year-old artist from Michigan who contacted him through Facebook after she paints a version of a photograph he took. Yaniv begins a relationship with the girl’s…
With the news that the eagerly anticipated Hobbit films were to become three, and a second trilogy for Peter Jackson, came no real surprise. The rumour had been floating around for a while – Peter Jackson had to merely confirm this as the case, in a statement released on Facebook on July 30th. This was…
Barnaby Walter takes a look at brutal horror films A Serbian Film (2010) and Kill List (2011).
Women Without Men is the debut feature of Shirin Neshat, a brave and talented Iranian artist who is daring to talk about a topic many stay away from: women in a conservative Islamic society. Her film is a beautiful, poetic adaptation of a 1990 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, a work which is banned in Iran.…