Category: Archive & Comment

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    The Edge

    Film Archive: Although frequently hilarious, The Truman Show isn’t your usual Jim Carrey movie

    My life in halls of residence isn’t the most eventful. Hardly anyone had much reason to be interested in my tastes, in films or otherwise. However, this began to change when I picked up a copy of Peter Weir’s 1998 satirical dramedy flick The Truman Show. It was at that moment that people were interested […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Film Archive: The original A Nightmare on Elm Street movie had intelligence, wit and bite

    Wes Craven’s iconic classic A Nightmare on Elm Street has been parodied, remade, continued and retread so much, the spirit of the first film is hard to remember. Horror expert Kim Newman, writing in his huge book Nightmare Movies (buy it – you have to), holds up Nightmare as the film “responsible for the resurrection […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Film Archive: Saw III is cinema at its most appalling and repugnant

    This is when it really got sick. This is when it became more about the torture, and less about suspense. This is when it got obsessed with suffering rather than ingenious puzzles and plot twists. In other words, this is when the most successful horror franchise of all time became, to put it bluntly, shit. […]

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    The Edge

    Film Archive: Animated Japanese thriller Paprika is a strange, surreal and unforgettable experience

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a group of people are tasked with uncovering a sinister conspiracy unfolding within the shifting landscape of dreams, and recurring themes involve references to detective and heist thrillers. If you immediately thought of Inception at the exact moment you heard mention of the word “dreams” in […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Film Archive: With her sophisticated debut Cracks, Ridley Scott’s daughter proves she is a talent to watch

    This confident directorial debut from Jordan Scott could be seen as a sexually repressed version of St Trinian’s, or a violent sequel to Wild Child. On its own, Scott succeeds in making it an effectively atmospheric drama about obsession, school-girl crushes and dangerous desires. Set in a remote 1930s girls’ boarding school, Eva Green plays games teacher […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Film Archive: Bronson is a horrible, self-indulgent mess of a film

    Tom Hardy gives a stunning performance as one of Britain’s most infamous criminals, but unfortunately the film as a whole is an unremittingly nasty and pretentious biopic. Unconventionally told with as much charm as a festering corpse, this is potentially dangerous stuff, depicting unforgivably violent and horrifying scenes in a glamorous, humorous and non-judgemental way. It’s […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Film Archive: South Korean drama Treeless Mountain deserves a larger audience

    Yong Kim delivers an affecting and memorable follow-up directorial effort to her 2006 feature In Between Days with this simple but interesting picture. It’s a sad tale of two young children whose mother leaves them to find their missing father. Their drunken aunt has to look after them – although “look after” is probably too strong a phrase, […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Badly plotted and painfully slow, The Girl Who Played With Fire is a dull failure

    The first entry in Swedish author Steig Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy became a surprise big-screen hit. The film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, was a near-perfect adaptation of Larsson’s novel. Chilling, reckless and relentlessly compelling, it was a foreign-language film for a mainstream audience, earning a place in multiplexes that […]

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    Barnaby Walter

    Almodóvar’s Bad Education is an unconventional, colourful feast of entertainment

    A mix of various influences and styles, Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 Spanish drama is an eccentric but spectacular work of art.

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    Barnaby Walter

    ARCHIVE: High School Musical 3: Senior Year ★★★★☆

    We’re all in this together

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    Barnaby Walter

    Bottom of the Barrel: Get Him to the Greek

    As sleazy, tasteless and misogynistic as any other Judd Apatow-backed comedy

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    Barnaby Walter

    ARCHIVE: Donkey Punch (2008) ★★★★☆

    Low-budget slasher is right up Barnaby Walter’s street

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    Barnaby Walter

    Bottom of the Barrel: Kick-Ass (2010)

    Kick-Ass gets a kicking

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    Barnaby Walter

    ARCHIVE: Bad Lieutenant (2009) ★★★★★

    Werner Herzog’s retelling of Abel Ferrera’s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant is not an easy watch. It contains graphic depictions of drug abuse, ugly scenes of cruelty and torture and ambiguous, but still distressing, scenes of potential sexual assault. It also has a script that’s far from sophisticated and direction as crazy as its subject matter. […]