This low budget but high voltage Brit thriller contains unflinching depictions of strong sex and brutal, bloody violence. I thoroughly enjoyed it. When three Leeds girls, holidaying in Mallorca, decide to accompany a bunch of amiable young men to their posh yacht they happily join in with the recreational drug use and group sex that…
It may seem insufferably stupid and have a God-awfully mushy ending but don’t be mistaken, Con Air hides a witty and self-mocking side that distinguishes it from the regular crop of testosterone-fuelled action flicks. Director Simon West and his talented cast clearly understand the absurdity of the material that they are working with and tackle…
Suspiria has become Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s best known work and it’s not hard to see why as, despite featuring some of the most brutal death scenes you are likely to see, it is also a visual treat for the eyes. The plot itself is relatively simple and perhaps rather sub-standard; Girl moves to ballet…
Tracking the exploits of high-school student Ferris and his two friends as they skip school to instead slack-off around Chicago, John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has become an archetypal teen movie with great comic set-pieces, an iconic car and an even more memorable title character. Performances are spot-on and characterisation is surprisingly rich for…
This superb comedy drama from Juno director Jason Reitman lets George Clooney fall back into his usual role…..the role of George Clooney. Intelligently spoken, quick in a conversation and never boring. But even though he does nothing here we haven’t seen him do before, he happens to be in a movie that’s equal to him…
Pedro Almodóvar has to be one of the most interesting directors working today. Bad Educaition, released in 2004, is a vibrant and beguiling movie, mixing together film noir, melodrama and colourful characters to make something bittersweet and utterly gorgeous. Almodova’s films are like a bucket of different coloured paints, swirled around to make something spectacular, out of…
Award winning Author Sarah Walters’ novel about Victorian England, Fingersmith was adapted into a BBC mini-series by Sally Head Productions in 2005. The DVD combines the two parts into a three hour film (I’m not too sure why, as the two parts of the story work well separately). It has a stellar cast including Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance…
Before it descended into pointless nastiness, the Saw series kicked off with some very good films. The first two movies were terrific, and my personal favourite is number one. Simply and provocatively entitled Saw (who knew what a powerhouse of a franchise that name would become), the film has echoes of David Fincher and Edgar…
Billy Bob Thornton is at his self-loathing best here playing Willie, a disgruntled alcoholic ‘Mall Santa’, a man who despises the kids that request presents from him almost as much as he hates himself. Every Christmas, Willie, and his obscenity-spewing dwarf companion Marcus (brilliantly played by Tony Cox) rob the Mall that they had been…
Spanking the Monkey is a hugely significant movie in that it deals with a subject matter still so taboo that most directors won’t go near it. David O Russell however is no such director. Boldly going where few dare to go, he gives us his own Oedipus in the form of Ray (Jeremy Davies), a…
Now they have reached their third adaptation, Disney seems to think Dickens’s classic story about the spirit of the festive season is well and truly theirs. Billed as “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”, you’d think that Charles Dickens bloke was just part of the initial conception process, with the Hollywood guys taking it off his hands…
In 2007 Quentin Tarantino teamed up with Robert Rodriguez with the intention of wanting to take audiences back to the days of low-brow, low budget and all round low-quality exploitation cinema. So with this in mind the pair served up Grindhouse, a double feature of lovingly crafted schlock designed to make you feel like you…
A little known independent film which first appeared back in 2010, Cold Weather is the third feature by American writer/director Aaron Katz, who made his name with seminal ‘mumblecore’ movies Dance Party USA and Quiet City. Whilst those films were content to simply represent ordinary people doing extremely ordinary things in what appeared to be…
Despite plans to translate Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from print to screen some 40 years back (with the likes of Scorsese, Akroyd and Belushi supposedly keen to chip in), it wasn’t until the unsung success of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I that anything had come close to capturing the spirit, motifs and sheer mayhem…