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…
Read MoreSicario 2: Soldado Review
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.
Read MoreFilm Review: Path of Blood
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…
Read MoreFilm Review: Studio 54
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…
Read MoreFilm Review: Zama
Reviewed by Lee Hill Zama is a sly historical anti-epic that deconstructs the expectations and assumptions viewers often bring to a certain kind of prestige film. Writer/director Lucrecia Martel’s first feature since The Headless Woman in 2008, follows the tragicomic efforts of a loyal colonial magistrate to maintain dignity as his superiors and those he rules treat him with contempt or indifference.
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: 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…
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