Film

By Linda Marric Kelly Reichardt Is fast becoming one of the most iconic director of her generation, her features have been hailed as some of most beautifully crafted and understated pieces of filmmaking of the last decade. In Certain Women, which was adapted from three different short stories by Maile Meloy, Reichardt delves into the lives of three different women living in Livingston, Montana and brings us a unique look at rural America from a fresh perspective. Earlier this week,...

By Linda Marric One minute into the credits of Kong: Skull Island and you can’t help but smile, because you know this isn’t going to be one of “those” monster films with unending battle scenes and little else. So if you were expecting a testosterone drenched blockbuster a la Michael Bay, rest assured that this is nothing of the sort. Produced by the same team who brought us Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014), Kong: Skull Island not so much borrows but...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel A montage near the end jumps through a diverse collection of fans explaining what heavy metal band X Japan means to them. Aside from adoration in their homeland, others from around the world express admiration, ranging from people who used their music to deal with dark emotions to an elderly woman attending her first concert since Elvis. It’s a hint of what could have been in a shallow and otherwise amiable documentary that skates through the...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP It takes some time to adjust to the accents of the characters in Trespass Against Us, not because they are difficult to understand, but because gangsters and criminals are not meant to sound like this. The rural west of England is not the traditional location for such dramas, which are much more accustomed to bleak inner city areas. There is a strange juxtaposition between the idyllic countryside and the brutish behaviour of the Cutler family. The...

By Linda Marric Seventy years after India’s partition, Gurinder Chadha delivers one of the most comprehensive looks at what went on during those tumultuous times. Her latest feature film Viceroy’s House is an ambitious undertaking which charters the last days of the British Raj and pays tribute to the millions of people uprooted from their homes or killed in the violent outbreaks that followed. Chadha’s own family was caught in what was to become one of the largest mass migrations...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Kelly Reichardt’s films are beautifully crafted poetic pieces feature unusual stories about unusual people. By her own admission, her films are “glimpses of people passing through”. Reichardt’s painstakingly long takes and repetitive quotidian scenes are what makes her productions into masterpieces of modern cinema. The Night Moves’ director is back with another understated study of rural America with the critically acclaimed Certain Women. The film, which won Best Film at last year’s London Film Festival is...

La La Land doesn’t deserve the awards, but it does deserve our applause Of his work, Busby Berkeley once said that he just “wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour”. The early 1930s was a time of great societal darkness; the world consumed by financial uncertainty & political discontent. Audiences were hungry for entertainment – they needed an escape – and Berkeley’s elaborately choreographed & unapologetically grand dance numbers, which defined such pre-Code musical classics as Dames,...

By: Michael McNulty It’s Friday night, supper’s finished, the washing ups been done and you’ve settled into the front room. Time for the great debate: what to watch tonight? You’ve exhausted your pre-recorded programmes, there’s nothing tickling your fancy on the TV and all the later screenings at your local cinema started 10 minutes ago. It’s alright there doesn’t need to be a debate, it’s been a long week, relax and enjoy this week’s Forgotten Friday Night Film. Released in...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel It’s easy to get carried away thinking of films as art, but sometimes it’s just a job. Southern Fury highlights this point, rounding up Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and Adrien Grenier, all of whom can surely only be in this dire thriller for the paycheck. Lacking just about all the ingredients required to make something watchable; Steven C. Miller’s film has to fall back on Cage in a ridiculous wig and fake nose to find any...