Featuring perhaps one of the greatest movie romances of all time, Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise sees Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as Jesse and Celine, two people who forge a life-altering bond over the course of one night in Vienna. The first in a three part film series which will conclude with the…
John Boorman’s Deliverance is a taut, tense and truly haunting meditation on man, nature and the nature of man that bitterly chews on the themes of rape, religion, society and survival. 40 years on from its original release, this masterfully shot and structured thriller remains a seminal piece of American cinema that has lost none of…
After the hype of Casino Royale, the best bond film since the Connery years, it was almost inevitable that the second helping of the rebooted franchise wouldn’t be as satisfying. This is true, but for me, it didn’t ruin my enjoyment at all. Picking up just an hour after Casino Royale left us hanging, we…
Much more than just the coolest film of 2011, director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive is an instant cult classic and a career defining film for both the Dane himself and lead man Ryan Gosling: measured, memorable and ultra violent. A modern day Taxi Driver with shades of Memento and like a 1970’s Scorsese, Winding Refn…
Beginning with the end, Memento, put simply, is a revenge tale in reverse that maps out onetime claims investigator Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) path to kill the man who brutally raped and murdered his wife. The plot is not configured in this manner to merely show-off, though. There is a reason for during the attack…
Michael Peterson a.k.a Bronson (Tom Hardy), was sentenced to 7 years in prison back in 1974 for robbing £26 from a Luton post office and has only seen 69 days of daylight since. Why so serious? You ask, well, behind bars, Bronson made a name for himself as a loose canon, sticking his middle finger…
Directed by Darren Aronofsky and based on the equally titled seventies drug novel by Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream examines the consumption of illegal drugs in a way never previously attempted on screen before, or since. Through an intense use of uncanny film-making techniques including split-screens, intercuts, wipe-cuts, hip-hop montages and over three…
Lovely Molly is an outstanding new horror film from Eduardo Sánchez, the co-director of The Blair Witch Project. He is widely regarded as the man who invented, or at least helped champion, the found-footage horror movie, and his latest chiller is an exceptional marriage of third-person and first-person narrative filmmaking. The film is probably best…
There was a time when you couldn’t even mention “Batman” without having to bare some idiot’s rendition of “na na na na na na na na na na na na”….And if it wasn’t that then you were left with little more than images in your mind of a camp crusader chasing down clowns and cats…
An eerie yet gorgeous tapestry of lingering close-ups; parallels, cuts and slow-motion photography, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a gruelling tale of mythical grandeur: a bizarre yet beautiful film chock full of sadism and shagging, Satanic dogma and similes. If you like your films light, clear and conservative, stay away. If, however, you’re a fan…
Disturbing yet allegorical, emotionally shallow yet erotically fierce, David Cronenberg’s crushingly warped world of sex, cars and sex in cars isn’t for those who like their films “middle-of-the-road”. Try “off- road”. James Spader plays horny TV exec’ James Ballard who, following a near fatal car crash with an equally horny Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter),…
Given the buzz and aftertaste of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s writing, it was only a matter of time before a second of the transgressive author’s books made that inevitable leap from page to screen. A matter of time, yes, but of all the tales to follow Fight Club, few could’ve expected Chuck’s riotously quaint…
Any film critic worth their spurs will tell you that the overall quality of a film is often determined by whether said film achieves what it ultimately set out to do. Whether that be to excite, scare, educate, entertain or inform. By this admission, Gareth Evans’ pulsating martial arts romp The Raid is a five…
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 one’s own film? Why not? Another question, though- how does a violent film with no on-screen violence obtain an 18 certificate in…