Film
Nick Hasted
Karen Gillan’s first Hollywood leading role finds her in the surely unusual position of not liking what she sees in the mirror. After five years as Doctor Who’s regularly killed and resurrected companion Amy Pond, life doesn’t get any easier for the now LA-based actress in this low-budget horror, as her character Kaylie Russell tries to outwit the malevolent mirror which caused her parents' death a decade earlier.Director Mike Flanagan’s elaboration of his 2005 short of the same name tips one wink to Who fans, when statues seem to move in the mirror, much like the Stone Angels who haunted Amy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What an astonishing rediscovery Juraj Jakubisko’s Birds, Orphans and Fools is! The 1969 Slovak film stans both outside history, and yet firmly within the context of its time, the year after Soviet troops quelled the Prague Spring. But its dating is eternal: the title’s inspired by the folk saying, “God takes care of birds, orphans and fools.”Put simply, Birds… is a loosely romantic threesome, centred around Andrej (Phillippe Avron), his best friend Yorick (yes, the Shakespearean references are there: Jirí Sýkora), and their street waif discovery, Marta (Magda Vásáryová, pictured below right Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sadly the battle to shape stories from a female perspective, or even to tell stories about women is far from over. The Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University recently found that women represented only 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013. If we look closer to home the most recent BFI statistics put the percentage of female directors working in the UK at just 8 percent (that's based on films released in the UK in 2012) - meaning this is even rarer than you'd think. So for a film to be directed by one woman and to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two knotted horrors stained West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Three 8-year-old boys, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore, went cycling on a sunny spring afternoon. Their torn, bruised and in Byers’ case castrated bodies were dragged from a stream the next day. Three local teenage boys, black-garbed outsiders Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., were then tried for the crimes with a carelessness, incompetence and prejudice which seemed actively malicious. This “West Memphis Three” sacrificed 18 years in jail, as authorities who had in some cases risen to power Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Sprawling over the East End of London for the next thirteen days and boasting an illuminating line-up of new voices, retrospectives and debate in its 13th year, the East End Film Festival ensures no cinematic rock is left unturned with its bold programming choices.Monte Hellman’s controversial Cockfighter gets a rare outing at Red Gallery, a grand Masonic Temple is home to a weekend of macabre cinema and the opening night gala proves the festival’s dedication to championing filmmakers they believe in with the world premiere of Ross Clarke’s first feature, New Orleans-set drama, Dermaphoria. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Twelve minutes into the Icelandic film Of Horses and Men something occurs on screen which was obviously going to happen, but actually seeing it happen is astonishing. It’s something which would normally either occur off screen or be alluded to. Of Horses and Men has many such uncomfortable moments. It’s also funny, heart-warming and poignant – a one-off.Of Horses and Men is set and filmed in rural Iceland. About the residents of a valley, their loves and their symbiotic relationship with their equine companions, it draws parallels between the behaviour of horse and human. What the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In 1921, Anton Phibes was killed in a fiery car crash. Horribly disfigured, he returns to avenge the death of his beautiful wife. So goes the set-up for The Abominable Dr Phibes, one of the UK’s finest cult horror films and very clearly a precursor to the Saw franchise, among others. Originally released in 1971, it has lost none of its camp splendour. This is a film like no other – except, of course, its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again. Vincent Price is the eccentric and cruel Phibes, Caroline Munro (uncredited) is his wife. Terry-Thomas and Joseph Cotton are among his victims.Presented as the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet is best known and loved for his early work: Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and (conveniently ignoring Alien: Resurrection) Amélie. These films introduced him as a director with a very particular, rather charming vision; they were sublime, sometimes twisted works of partial fantasy which the more recent A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs didn't quite live up to. With his latest, T.S. Spivet, Jeunet does something quite exciting: he takes the highly characterful way he sees the world and fashions it into three dimensions. It makes for a vibrant Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"We're too old for this shit," quips Jenko (Channing Tatum), quoting one of the greats of weary screen policing - Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh - in response to his latest nonsensically spectacular brush with death. "We started off too old for this shit," shoots back his partner Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Welcome to 22 Jump Street: a film that wears a lack of originality not just on its sleeve but as its whole outfit. Its predecessor 21 Jump Street was the big screen remake that promised little but delivered in belly laughs. But surely a sequel is stretching the joke too thin?Thankfully this turns out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir excels at catching both individuality of character and wider background context in her second feature, When I Saw You. The initial background is a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967, where displaced families arrive from their lost homes across the border after the Six-day War (the film’s title alludes to the fact that Palestine is so close as to be almost visible, at the same time almost impossibly far away). And the character is 11-year-old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa, main picture), a mischievous yet thoughtful boy who’s there with his mother Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal), as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of Charles Dickens's shortcomings as a novelist was his inability to breathe authentic emotional life into young women characters (Bella Wilfer and Estella possibly excepted). The likes of Dora Spenlow, Lizzie Hexam, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare, Pet Meagles, and the "Littles" – Em'ly, Dorrit, and Nell – are scarcely three-dimensional. A rebel like Tattycoram has to be tamed. Dickens favoured long-suffering child-women who gratefully accept domestic servitude.Or, in the case of Nelly Ternan, his mistress, romantic and sexual servitude. In one of several excruciating scenes in Ralph Fiennes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...