Film

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Tomato red is almost the colour of Jamalee Merridew’s hair, and it’s the name of the Daniel Woodrell novel from which this film is adapted. Woodrell has written nine novels to date, a number of them set in the bleak forgotten lands of the Ozarks; mountainous country crossing over Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. There’s clearly something cinematic about his work because two previous novels became the excellent Ride with the Devil (1999) and Winter’s Bone (2010)....

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel On cursory inspection, the new film from French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, the sixth already from a man not due to turn 28 until next month, is a distant proposition. It seems sterile and forbidding, full of stagey artifice, which is not necessarily a surprise given it’s an adaptation of Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play of the same name. And it is all these things, only very deliberately so to achieve an even greater impact. The premise is simple...

By Leslie Byron Pitt I’m sure some will consider me a philistine for my dislike for We Are the Flesh. Some may perhaps consider me a wuss. Indoctrinated on too main mainstream cinema to deal with the more shocking aspects of Emiliano Rocha Minter’s transgressive art film. It’s clear that We Are the Flesh is looking to push boundaries and borders and arouse reaction within a viewer. Even if they are ones of disgust. I, however, found myself bored and...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Massimo is a man who should have it all. He lives in a world of elegant apartments and swanky parties before heading out to fashion shows, football games, and war zones, the varied diet that comes with his journalism job. Yet for a man living such an interesting life, he’s not actually lived a single minute of it. Sweet Dreams is a surface deep attempt to show how childhood trauma can destabilise everything that follows. Marco...

Stage to Screen dramas are composed of powerful and heavy dialogue, focusing heavily on the commanding performances of actors and their ability to deliver lines. This enables the audience to decipher the messages that lay otherwise hidden within the dialogue and actions. August Wilson’s long awaited stage to screen adaptation of Fences will surely be next on the list of phenomenal films of this ilk. Coming to cinemas everywhere on 17th February, audience will witness the unforgettable performances of Denzel...

By Leslie Byron Pitt Troubled adolescent John Wayne Cleaver is surrounded by death. In his small quiet Midwestern hometown, he balances school with a part-time role working at his mother’s funeral home. Recently diagnosed as a sociopath, John spends his work life cracking dark jokes about the cadavers and freaking out the people at his school with his morbid essays. Not much happens in this ma and pa, middle American town, however, a spate of mysterious murders has recently plagued...

Michael McNulty Let’s be honest, how many times have you decided against a night in, instead opting for a night of heavy drinking and ear deafeningly loud chart topping tracks just to avoid flipping through endless TV channels, scrolling past countless Netflix programmes and trawling an infinite number of IMDB webpages. Finding the Friday night film sometimes seems like too daunting a task, so you make the easy choice and surrender yourself to a boozey night out, when really your...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric  House of Flying Daggers director Yimou Zhang new film The Great Wall is a spectacular behemoth of a film. A fantasy which centres around one of the many mythical stories surrounding the mystery of great wall of China. The film is to this date, the biggest ever co-production between China and Hollywood and features some of the most accomplished actors and martial-arts experts in the business. It is also Yimou Zhang’s first English speaking production. The...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel The treatment of refugees is still an ignored problem. Whether the West is directly or indirectly involved - and given the long tentacles of history, it’s usually one of the two - the fate of those left to bear the brunt of chaotic violence and repression is rarely given attention. The Longest Road is an attempt to remedy this, and while repeatedly falling prey to muddled thinking, it gamely grapples with a complex subject. Clocking it...