“You don’t know what you’re getting into.” Small-time journalist Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) keeps hearing variations on that statement, delivered by Washington insider Fred Weil (Michael Sheen). ‘What he’s getting into’ is a national scandal involving the CIA, Nicaragua and thousands of kilos of cocaine smuggled into the United States daily. Webb is a 1990s…
It’s easy to forgive horror films their sins if they’re actually scary. If Annabelle had been a genuinely frightening film, I could’ve happily forgiven its hollow Polanski references – ranging from a host of Rosemary’s Baby quotations to a Charles Manson’s appearance on television. I wouldn’t have had a problem with how it mishandles/abandons its…
Is it an inevitability that horror franchises trend towards soft-core porn the longer they run? Probably not – Nightmare on Elm Street found its way to bad puns while Friday the 13th travelled to New York, Hell and, eventually, outer space. It’s certainly the case with the Wrong Turn series, which began as gory-hillbilly-survival-horror, took…
Read a description of Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar – the tale of a Palestinian freedom fighter forced into collaboration by the Israeli secret forces – and you’ll probably imagine a slice of social realism. You know, natural lighting, no non-diegetic music, liberal use of handheld camera and a nuanced take on Israel-Palestine aggression. The actual picture…
Proxy is two hours of emotional and narrative withholding which combines preposterous thriller and horror movie tropes together into a flat, underwhelming experience. That flatness is almost certainly intentional (it’s hard to imagine any director getting such unemotive performances unintentionally), but it only served to disengage me from the proceedings, blunting the impact of a…
Tusk represents a kind of critical milestone for me, as the first film I found so unpleasant that I walked out of it. Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely Tusk’s foulness (punctuated by a particularly terrible cameo) that sent me from the cinema twenty minutes before its conclusion: the exodus of the group I was sitting with…
Opening with a Thoreau quote questioning how best to tackle unjust laws, The Internet’s Own Boy makes it very clear where it stands on the issue, lionising legendary internet hacktivist Aaron Swartz’s downloading (theft, if you prefer) of library documents as a necessary act of political rebellion. The documentary is disingenuous, making the tenuous argument…
Willow Creek seems destined to disappoint hardcore horror fans. This found footage film lacks the grotesque gore or spark of originality that horror fans search for, but that doesn’t necessarily render the film ineffective. The film is constructed from Blair Witch Project blueprints with few departures, as Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) and Jim (Bryce Johnson) head…
Soderbergh’s recent interpretation of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a black-and-white silent film has critics pondering the essence of cinema: “moving images.” I was reminded of such power watching South is Nothing. Fabio Mollo’s feature-length debut focuses on a father (Vinicio Marchioni) and daughter Grazia (Miriam Karlkvist, playing a convincingly-boyish tomboy) coping with the…
Featuring in the Italian Film Festival program, The Mafia Only Kills in Summer is perfectly calibrated for a film festival audience, weaving a lightweight romantic comedy through a scaffolding of historical mafia murders in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The title is taken from an offhand comment made to young Arturo (played by Alex Bisconti…
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