Reviewed by Lee Hill When Stanley Kubrick was alive, little was known about his working methods due to his unwillingness to participate in publicity beyond the release date. As the gaps between films grew, Kubrick’s reclusiveness added to the mystique that his canon was created in near perfect, seemingly infinite and almost magic conditions of freedom and possibility. Since Kubrick died in 1999, the mythic aura around Kubrick remains, but…
Read MoreFilm Review: A Cambodian Spring
Reviewed by Lee Hill On paper, a two hour plus account of a land dispute in Cambodia sounds like a worthy documentary subject, but also like being forced to eat all your vegetables. The reality is that A Cambodian Spring works on the senses like a sly thriller with close to the bone reminders of how many developers flaunt the law and human rights in collaboration with governments ducking responsibility…
Read MoreFilm Review: Revenge
Reviewed by Luke Channell The rape-revenge genre is a challenging place to start for any new director, yet Coralie Fargeat knocks it out of the park with her super-stylish, blood-splattered debut feature Revenge. It’s scarcely believable that this is Fargeat’s first film, such is the assurance and distinctiveness of her direction. Fargeat’s confidently approaches the often-maligned rape-revenge genre, making subtle but invigorating changes to its tropes. The result is a…
Read MoreRedoubtable: Screenwords Meets Director Michel Hazanavicius
Nadia Bee talks to director Michel Hazanavicius about his latest film Redoubtable. A cheerfully iconoclastic film, Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable has provoked both ire and delight. Jean-Luc Godard is considered such a key figure in both European culture and political history that to treat him with levity is outrageous to some, and just deserts to others. Hazanavicius has said that critical responses have, at times, been as if he’d peed on the…
Read MoreFilm Review: Mansfield 66/67
Reviewed by Lee Hill After Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield is the other mythic blonde bombshell that haunts Hollywood’s past and present. Her fame mainly rests on her comedic roles in two Frank Tashlin films, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), arguably the first truly visionary rock n’ roll movie, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957). Typecast as a well-endowed bimbo, Mansfield tried to do more serious work, but earned…
Read MoreFilm Review: Entebbe
Reviewed by Lee Hill A glance at the Wikipedia entry for Operation Entebbe, the 4 July 1976 raid by Israeli commandos into Uganda to rescue 106 passengers of a hijacked Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris, reveals a depressing number of near forgotten films, made-for-TV movies, documentaries and other fictions inspired-by. The historical record somehow remains unsullied by these attempts at a greater truth (read: mega-box office success…
Read MoreFilm Review: New Town Utopia
Reviewed by Lee Hill Christopher Ian Smith’s lyrical documentary looks at Basildon, one of 10 new towns approved and developed to provide innovative as well as affordable housing solutions after the Second World War. In September 1948 MP Lewis Silkin. Minister of Town and Country Planning in Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s government said: “Basildon will become a City which people from all over the world will want to visit. It…
Read MoreFilm Review: ANON
Reviewed by Zoe Margolis Shot in a monochromatic, desaturated style, ANON offers a dulled vision of a near-future where no one has any secrets, or privacy. Unlike now, where people voluntarily upload personal information to social media platforms (or involuntarily, as is the case with Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of Facebook content), citizens of this society appear to have no choice as to how their data is accessed. Instead of mobile…
Read MoreLFF 2017: Redoubtable
One of the unofficial laws surrounding biopics is the more complex and rich the subject, the more reductive and superficial the treatment of the life. Redoubtable is ostensibly about a great cinema revolutionary, Jean-Luc Godard, but his life and art are alas interpreted by Michel Hazanavicius, a director who wears his slim talent for pastiche heavily. Hazanavicius is best known for The Artist, one of the least deserving Best Picture…
Read MoreFilm Review: Beast
Reviewed by Lee Hill Francois Truffaut will never be entirely forgiven by some of the country’s film buffs for saying that British cinema was a contradiction in terms. For every bold visionary like Michael Powell, Nicolas Roeg, Derek Jarman or Lynne Ramsay, there are countless directors whose plodding efficiency and middle brow choice of subject can make one long for the personal signature of a Richard Donner (yes, he did…
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