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Category: DVD

DVD Release: Brimstone

Reviewed by Nadia Bee

Out of all the imaginable Wild Wests, director Martin Koolhaven has conjured up, in Brimstone, a world where fear and resistance meet overwhelming sadism. Scenes of intolerable cruelty unfold in visually sumptuous settings, with music -by Junkie XL – to match. Meanwhile the lives those scenes depict are harsh, dour, and almost entirely without respite. This is a grand film, with an ambitious story and an exceptional cast. Every frame looks beautiful.

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Film Review: Zoology

On the surface this bizarre little Russian film could be misinterpreted as a strange fetish tale about a woman with a tail – not just a tiny one like that of Jason Alexander’s in Shallow Hal, but a full-length animalistic tail, fleshy in colour and with a mind of its own. This emotive story ventures deeper than that. It’s a story of how single women of a certain age are perceived and the aching loneliness that envelopes its victim with the longing to just fit in.

Ambitiously, writer and director Ivan Tverdovsky has tenderly touched on the story of Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova), a middle-aged, drably dressed woman who still lives at home with her overtly religious mother. Bullied at work by two women who are old enough to know better and should have left their mean girls spirit in the playground when they left school. When she faints at work, she is subjected to a number of hospital visits for x-rays on her tail, raising her hopes that she could finally be able to do something about the one thing that has impacted her sad and lonely life.

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