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Month: June 2018

Edinburgh Film Festival: L’Apparition

Edinburgh Film Festival: L’Apparition

Published June 30, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

The Catholic Church has seen better days at the cinema. During the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s, The Church acted as gatekeeper and censor ensuring that both the Holy Spirit and Hays Code were affirmed. The clergy on film tended to come with a touch of the blarney a la Bing Crosby or as sympathetic, but ineffectual sounding boards like Karl Malden in On The Waterfront. More unorthodox or radical explorations of The Church, such as the work of Luis Bunuel or Robert Bresson, were relegated to film festivals and the art house Still every now and then faith would be explored with more than just good taste, but moral complexity in films like Fred Zinnemann’s A Nun’s Story or Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess.

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Sicario 2: Soldado Review

Sicario 2: Soldado Review

Published June 29, 2018 By Wyndham Hacket Pain

Reviewed by Wyndham Hacket Pain

Aliens was famously released with the tagline: This time it’s war. The same line could easily be used to describe Sicario 2: Soldado. Where the original concerned itself with a single drug cartel, the sequel imagines everything on a larger scale. For the franchise’s second outing the objective is to only not undermine the Mexican drug cartels but to have them raging war against each other.

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Film Review: Path of Blood

Film Review: Path of Blood

Published June 26, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

Terrorism is so often framed as an “us” vs. “them” proposition – First World being attacked by everyone else – in mainstream media outlets that it is important to be reminded that the worst impact is still being felt in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South-East Asia. Jonathan Hacker’s documentary, Path of Blood, is an absorbing examination of one such front line, Saudi Arabia. Drawing on over 500 hours of propaganda footage shot by Al-Qaeda cells from 2003 through 2005 that was seized by the Saudi authorities, as well as more traditional news sources, Path of Blood takes us straight into the hearts and minds of young Al-Qaeda members as well as the unwieldy efforts of the House of Saud to check the former’s campaign of terror.

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Film review: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Film review: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Published June 22, 2018 By April McIntyre

Reviewed by April McIntyre

“The world is full of sounds” utters Ryuichi Sakamoto, as he sits, listening intently beneath a canopy of trees. The subject of Coda, an acclaimed actor and composer reveals not only his sound-making process but his own worldview and the influence of an ever-changing society on his work.

The documentary, five years in the making is as meditative and as emotional as its subject. We’re introduced to Sakamoto tinkering, almost child-like on a surviving piano of the 2011 Tsunami. Consumed with inquisitiveness, excited to hear the sound of something that he describes as being bent and tuned by nature.
Director, Stephen Schible creates a fascinating balance between the personal and the candid as the film follows the composer with limited interaction and only intermittent nods to the camera. Schible uses Sakamoto’s sound creation, stunning vistas and old footage to piece together everything that makes the subject one of the most imaginative and daring contemporary composers alive today.

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Film Review: In the Fade

Film Review: In the Fade

Published June 19, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

As clichés go, “revenge is a dish best served cold” ranks as one of the more vacuous. History is full of countless examples of eye for an eye retribution. Acts of vengeance may simmer. but are rarely far from boiling point. Much of the debate around how to deal with terrorism and its causes strives to get opponents to the negotiating table on the basis that endless retribution is futile. Yet the violence continues, and it is this all too human endgame that makes In the Fade such compelling viewing despite its missteps.

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Film Review: Studio 54

Film Review: Studio 54

Published June 6, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

In the mid-70s, reggae, punk and disco pushed and shoved a complacent rock scene into new musical frontiers. When two Syracuse University buddies, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, with the aid of $500k from silent partner, Jack Dushey, converted an old CBS TV studio in mid-town Manhattan into the legendary dance club, Studio 54, disco got a cocaine fueled boost into the mainstream. From 1977 to 1980, the club became mythic as a hedonistic living theater for celebrities, jet setters (or what was not so long ago called Eurotrash), bohemians, gays, die-hard eccentrics and people who just wanted to dance the night away.

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