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Film Review: The Nile Hilton Incident

Film Review: The Nile Hilton Incident

Published March 1, 2018 By Rachael Kaines

Reviewed by Rachael Kaines

Tarik Saleh delivers with The Nile Hilton Incident a compelling and taut thriller, that manages to remain engaging and unpredictable right up to its end. The transportation of the specific Scandi thriller style, with all its preoccupation with corruption and mistreatment of unseen minorities to Egypt works very well. A lot of the issues this type of thriller tends to deal, corruption and accountability for crimes, with are tangible and pervasive in the pre-revolutionary Cairo in which the film is set.

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Report: I, Tonya Press Conference

Report: I, Tonya Press Conference

Published February 23, 2018 By Amon Warmann

Report by Amon Warmann

I, Tonya has been a big player in this year’s awards season, and for good reason. Margot Robbie delivers a career-best performance as Tonya Harding – an ex figure skating champion with a shocking story to tell – and she’s ably supported by an eye-catching turn from Allison Janney, Harding’s overbearing mother.

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Film Review: Finding Your Feet

Film Review: Finding Your Feet

Published February 21, 2018 By Rachael Kaines

Reviewed by Rachael Kaines

Finding Your Feet, the new film directed by Richard Loncraine (Wimbledon), features an all-star cast in a predictable, but fun flick. Great performances and funny moments make up for a story that loses momentum partway through. Finding Your Feet is an enjoyable, but flawed comedy/drama.

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Film Review: The Touch

Film Review: The Touch

Published February 20, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

The reissue of the rarely seen 1971 film, The Touch, Ingmar Bergman’s first collaboration with an American studio, is part of a retrospective now playing at the British Film Institute until the end of March. Whether seen separately or with other Bergman films (the BFI is also promoting Persona, The Seventh Seal and The Magic Flute), The Touch, despite its problematic history, confirms the director’s reputation as a compassionate, albeit unsentimental explorer of men and women in intense states of joy, despair, loss, love, hope and grief.

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Film Review: The Shape of Water

Film Review: The Shape of Water

Published February 16, 2018 By Rachael Kaines

Reviewed by Rachael Kaines

With The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro has finally returned to form. A charming and beautiful romance as well as a tale (tail) of underdogs (fish) of all shapes and sizes. del Toro manages to represent many marginalised aspects of society in the setting of America during the cold war (even a group we never knew were marginalised — fish men).

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DVD Release: Brimstone

DVD Release: Brimstone

Published February 15, 2018 By admin

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: Loveless

Film Review: Loveless

Published February 8, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

For international audiences, Andrey Zvyagintsev is THE Russian director in the way that Andrei Tarkovsky was in the 80s. Since his astonishing debut in 2003, The Return, he has found a way to combine portraits of individuals in crisis with wider examinations of Russia’s inability to move away from totalitarianism. In his last two films, Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014), relationships between men and women are severely disrupted if not shattered by the social, economic and political dysfunction of Putin’s Russia. Zvyagintsev views the citizens of his fractured homeland not just with the eye of a poet, but a clinician’s knack for making sense of the fragments and the grim reflections of what is left.

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Film Review: The Mercy

Film Review: The Mercy

Published February 7, 2018 By Lee Hill

Reviewed by Lee Hill

In 1968, Donald Crowhurst, family man, struggling inventor and amateur sailor, was determined to boost the profile of a navigation device too ahead of its time. He decided to enter the Golden Globe, an around the world race sponsored by The Sunday Times. Despite not having sailed beyond the coast of Devon and struggling to keep his tiny company going, Crowhurst felt the risk was worth it. He convinced local businessmen to underwrite the construction of a state-of-the-art Trimaran, but building delays forced Crowhurst to start his voyage in late autumn as weather conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific became more challenging.

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