Motorcycle racing requires a precise balance – both the physical balance necessary to navigate tight corners at high speeds, and the psychological balance of the exhilaration of extreme risk and the fatal consequences of pushing that risk too far. Unfortunately, motorcycle racing documentary Road, which chronicles the sharp turns of the Dunlops, an Irish family…
This morning I woke up, stumbled out of bed, then checked Twitter, because apparently that’s where my priorities are directed nowadays. I discovered that Film Twitter – that is, the loose collection of cinephiles and critics that populate Twitterdom – had set its sights on what sounded like a monumentally misjudged takedown of Best Picture…
Sion Sono throws everything he’s got at Why Don’t You Play in Hell? “Everything” includes duelling yakuza clans, a ragtag crew of wannabe filmmakers called the “Fuck Bombers”, a budding actress packing an incredibly catchy toothpaste jingle and the querulous young man who pretends to be her boyfriend. The film’s introduction is necessarily a bit…
Finding Fela!, a documentary from Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) about legendary Nigerian singer/political dissident Fela Kuti, follows the model popularised by the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugar Man. That model, found in the likes of Finding Vivien Maier, The Last Impresario, A Band Called Death – tends to…
Rosemary’s Baby is arguably a perfect film; it stands to reason that Stewart Thorndike’s low-budget lesbian riff on Polanski’s classic would fall short of its source material. Her adaptation, Lyle, doesn’t follow Rosemary’s Baby to the letter – the couple is composed of two women, they already have a child when they move into a…
The Gambler has earned its fair share of criticism for being yet another film about the problems of a rich white dude. That’s more of an observation than a criticism, since the film is interrogating the idea of how one can deliberately erode this privilege. A fairer remark would be to note that, unfortunately, The…
A movie about sex – kinky sex – is in cinemas, and as a film critic, and therefore a noted arbiter of good taste (bear with me), I’m expected to regard this adaptation of a smutty bestseller with derision or, at best, suspicion. But let’s take a different tack, shall we? Why not approach the…
Remember the last low-brow comedy to centre on the attempted assassination of a world leader? I’m of course talking about Zoolander, where Ben Stiller’s empty-headed male model was brainwashed to murder the prime minister of Malaysia. Roger Ebert took issue with the subplot – “Didn’t it strike anybody connected with this movie that it was…
Kwaidan probably deserves a higher rating than the three stars I’ve given it here; I watched this at GOMA’s Myths and Legends screening (it was the ~160 min European cut, not the 183 minute cut they advertised) in the middle of a busy week and spent the majority of the film drifting in and out…
The Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma is primarily composed of individuals undergoing impassioned debates. We watch King (David Oyelowo) and Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) verbally spar over voting rights; with segregation outlawed in 1960s America, African-Americans find their legal right to vote denied, and divided camps of activists argue about the best way…
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