Canadian director and co-writer of Siddharth, Richie Mehta, was inspired by his own encounter with a man on the streets of India looking for his lost son. His film poses the same questions Mehta must have had after this encounter. “What happened to the boy?” And, perhaps as importantly, “How could a father know so…
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…
A decade on, Alpha Dog is most notable for establishing both Justin Timberlake and Anton Yelchin as respectable actors. This plucked-from-the-headlines crime picture put Timberlake in the role of a charismatic kidnapper and Yelchin as his fifteen-year-old abductee, and they both do great work. It’s worth remembering, though, that Alpha Dog also stands as a…
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…
Solomon Northup’s autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave, was a bestseller in its own time, but like many others I’d never heard of this account of Northup’s gruelling ordeal in slavery until it was adapted into Steve McQueen’s masterpiece 12 Years a Slave. (McQueen’s film is actually the second adaptation of the book – television movie…
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…
There must be some kind of kismet in the air this week, as right after wrapping my first – long-delayed – viewing of landmark series Twin Peaks and its darkly terrifying prequel, Fire Walk with Me, I woke to the news of Lynch confirming a nine episode continuation of the show (and I mean I…
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…
As a long-time David Fincher devotee, the first half hour of Gone Girl represents the first time I’ve doubted the director (full disclosure: I’ve never seen Benjamin Button). The film intercuts between Nick Dunne – writer, bar-owner, Ben Affleck – and his wife Amy – writer, actual-owner-of-the-bar, Rosamund Pike – through the past and present.…
Where have all the superhero origin stories gone? Turns out they’ve transformed – in this case into a cloud of bats titled Dracula Untold. Like Noah, Maleficent and Hercules before him, Count Dracula gets the origin story treatment, hewing closer than ever to the ever-popular superhero genre. The armour worn by Vlad (Luke Evans) –…
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