Reviewed by Lee Hill The bitterness of separation, divorce and the all too common legal battles between former spouses has made for familiar terrain at the movies. Shoot the Moon, Kramer Vs. Kramer, The War of the Roses, Blue Valentine and Boyhood are a few titles that spring to mind and of course, television drama would be crippled without domestic strife as convenient narrative fodder. Given the countless variations on…
Read MoreFilm Review: Ghost Stories
Reviewed by Tom Rowley BBC’s The League of Gentlemen was a hilarious pastiche of comedy stories that, at heart, had an endearing love for the hammer-horror genre. So it’s fitting that one of the show’s creators, Jeremy Dyson, has co-written and co-directed with Andy Nyman, a movie reminiscent of a Vincent Price platform, tying together horror vignettes throughout a mysterious overarching narrative. In his latest project, Ghost Stories, the horror-to-comedy ratio…
Read MoreFilm Review: I Kill Giants
Reviewed by Luke Channell An alluring strangeness fuels this debut feature from director Anders Walter which combines touching coming-of-age drama with eye-catching magical realism. Based on a graphic novel by Joe Kelly (who also adapts the screenplay), I Kill Giants follows the journey of high-schooler Barbara (Madison Wolfe) who envelops herself in a fantasy world to cope with her upsetting reality. While this premise is hardly thematically ground-breaking (comparisons with…
Read MoreLFF 2017: 120 BPM
120 BPM is a film you tend to admire rather than love. Robin Campillo’s film deals with the rise of Act Up in France in the late 80s and early 90s as the activist group tackled the complacency of government, medical and pharmaceutical establishments in dealing with the crisis. If the film veers towards being a polemic at times, it contains many scenes that remind one of the anguish and…
Read MoreGhost Stories: Interview with Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson
Ahead of the special screening of Ghost Stories at the Horror Channel Frightfest Glasgow 2018 event, writer / director team Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson discuss their special relationship, the film’s journey from stage to screen and no, they don’t believe in ghosts… Ghost Stories receives it’s Scottish Premiere at FrightFest Glasgow 2018. Excited? We are beyond excited! It is honestly a dream come true.
Read MoreFilm Review: A Gentle Creature
Reviewed by Lee Hill Vladimir Putin may be looking forward to another six years of running the Russian Federation, but his country’s best filmmakers will not give him an easy ride. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Loveless have been recent state-of-the-nation molotovs lobbed at Mother Russia. Sergei Lotznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is a further reminder that, despite the monolithic philistinism that Putin embodies and revels in, dissident filmmaking is not just…
Read MoreFilm Review: The Bachelors
Reviewed by Luke Channell “I can’t stay here anymore” declares a mournful Bill (J. K. Simmons) to his teenage son Wes (Josh Wiggins) at the very beginning of Kurt Voelker’s indie dramedy The Bachelors. Attempting to move on from the sudden death of Bill’s wife, the pair relocate from their family home in San Francisco to a small rental property in Los Angeles. Despite this cookie-cutter premise – plus a…
Read MoreComing Soon: Tony Richardson and Woodfall Films
Tony Richardson and Woodfall Films: A Revolution in British Film A month-long season at the BFI Southbank, April 2018 Reviewed by Lee Hill From 1959 to 1963, director Tony Richardson became synonymous with “kitchen sink realism”. That catchphrase simultaneously celebrated and dismissed a new wave in British film. The wave first came to attention when Richardson and Karel Reisz screened their documentary short, Mamma Don’t Allow, as part of the…
Read MoreFilm Review: Ready Player One
Reviewed by Zack Evans Cyberpunk has been with us for quite some time, but it has never quite gone mainstream. Whilst Philip K Dick has been embedded in sci-fi film culture for decades, surprisingly few of the other big names (Sterling, Stephenson, Noon…) have made it directly into the medium, except Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic, and his Pattern Recognition is stuck in Dev Hell. Instead, cyberpunk has diffused through geek culture in general,…
Read MoreInterview with Gholam Director Mitra Tabrizian
Interview with Mitra Tabrizian, co-writer and director of Gholam by author and Screenwords critic Lee Hill Gholam is the haunting feature film debut of Mitra Tabrizian. In collaboration with her co-writer, Cyrus Massoudi, Tabrizian has created a subtle character study of an Iranian exile in London trying to make a living as a mini-cab driver and in his free time, struggling to move on from a dark and complicated past as…
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