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…
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…
As I’m sure you have already gathered, 2012 is Bond’s 50th anniversary, and Skyfall really marks that landmark with style. It’s the best Bond film for years, even better than Daniel Craig’s fantastic debut Casino Royale back in 2006. I was one of the few people who actually rather liked Quantum of Solace, but that…
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…
Movies as fun, warm-hearted and terrifically scripted as this don’t come along regularly. Surprisingly, we’ve had two in one month – The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and now Liberal Arts, a romantic comedy with wit, intelligence, and a fabulous group of talented actors. Josh Radner, famous for his television comedy work, writes, directs and…
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…
Another week, another great line up of films! This week Union Films have covered all genre bases with films ranging from tense financial drama Margin Call (this week’s Phoenix screening) through the action packed Safe and The Amazing Spider-Man and all the way to comedy musical Rock of Ages. To top it all off this…
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…