Godzilla

A quite ridiculous amount of fun to be had here and the achievement of Gareth Edwards in making an intelligent blockbuster after his brilliant debut feature “Monsters” last year should not be underestimated. Special plaudits are due to producer Yoshimitsu Banno who backed the promise shown there with this mega budget reworking of Ishiro Honda’s…

Fading Gigalo

Writer, Director and Star John Turturro clearly carries a massive torch for Woody Allen. Here he steals Allen’s New York location, makes free with his signature jazz based score and writes a fast talking wisecracking role for a nerdy Jew. No prizes for guessing who he casts for the role. But despite a promising opening…

A Touch of Sin

More that a touch – there’s a whole bucketload going on in Zhangke Jia’s caustic portmanteau of a film which shows a picture of modern China at once throbbing with a kind of frontier mentality but at the same time mired in corruption, misogyny and violence. This is a brave depiction given Jia’s previous ban…

A Story of Children and Film

Sometimes you feel quite privileged to see a movie which works artistically, intellectually and creatively. Mark Cousins’ follow up to his epic series “The Story of Film” succeeds triumphantly. For a Cinefile this was a rich, layered, endlessly fascinating look at an often neglected area of cinema and, given the indefinite article in the title,…

Cheap Thrills

A scabrous take on modern America from E L Katz whose first feature provides a brilliant and pithy account of how uncontrolled capitalism now manifests itself and poisons all it touches. The set up is crystal clear. Craig (Pat Healy) is lower middle class. He has had a college education and ambitions to be a…

The Wind Rises

……and we must try to live! This line from Paul Valery is quoted repeatedly through Hayao Miyazaki’s latest and possibly last film, a sumptuous animation depicting the life and times of Jiro Horikoshi. It begins with Jiro as a boy dreaming of the freedom of flight, but realistic enough to know that with his jam…

Omar

Omar (Adam Bakri) is a baker on the West Bank. But he’s also a Palestinian freedom fighter and a would be lover to the sister of his best friend Tarek (Iyan Hoorani) . He lives in a community that is fractured politically by the occupation and physically by an enormous wall which separates him from…

The Fault in our Stars

Its hard not to be moved by the plight of a couple of American teenagers who are falling in love and who have terminal illnesses. Hard, but not impossible. This film was so manipulatively mawkish that I was afraid I might get washed away on the flood of tears which Director, Josh Boone seemed determined…

Frank

Every so often a film comes along which ticks all my boxes and yet somehow still leaves me slightly cold. The plot here is gossamer thin. Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is a junior reporter on a moribund local newspaper when he witnesses a comically inept suicide attempt on the beach. But instead of posting the story…

Blue Ruin

What a little gem. A very impressive take on the revenge movie from Director Jeremy Saulnier who put his life savings and a modest bundle from “Kickstarter” in this sharp Coenesque critique of American gun culture. The film opens with a protracted series of silent scenes which reveal the life, times and backstory of Dwight…

Jimmy’s Hall

The masters and pastors are bastards. So says one of the minor characters in Ken Loach’s slightly disappointing sequel to the infinitely superior “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”. Set in 1932 this tells the rather thin story of Jimmy Grafton, a left wing sympathiser, who returns to his Irish home from America, where he…

Ilo Ilo

A debut feature from Anthony Chen which deservedly picked up prizes at Cannes and Berlin last year for best newcomer. It tells a deceptively simple story of a family living in Singapore and is acknowledged to be, at least in part, auto biographical. Its 1997 and the Asian financial meltdown is just beginning to bite.…

Belle

This could easily have been a TV movie broadcasting perhaps on BBC1 on Easter Sunday. It is competently made by Amma Asante and boasts a quality ensemble cast which is bound to have you wondering “what the hell have I seen them in”? But there were a couple of fatal flaws. First the script was…

Before the Winter Chill

About half an hour into this I began to think that it was all terribly familiar. For anyone who has seen, admired and enjoyed Michael Henke’s Hidden, this will probably leave you feeling a bit short changed. The stories both feature a contented, well respected and wealthy middle class couple who enjoy all the trappings…