Film

Landscape of Horrors By Michael McNulty Imagine being trapped in your car, stalked by a truck down endless highways, or chased through the Louisiana swamps by a vengeful group of Cajun hunters. Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting for survival, having to keep your wits about you in landscapes that seem to do nothing but steal your wits from you. Here are five films that do the imagining for you. Duel – Stephen Spielberg (1971)   Duel, Stephen...

By Linda Marric  @linda_marric After 25 years spent as a camerawoman on various award winning documentary features, Kirsten Johnson amassed hours upon hours of outtakes and candid moments from her trips to Bosnia, Kabul and Darfur, to name but a few places. Born out of this was a truly unique piece of filmmaking. In Cameraperson Johnson offers an authentic look at some of the most touching as well as some of the most harrowing accounts witnessed by men, women and...

By Linda Marric When Breitbart, a pro-Trump alt-right news website, posted a story about how a mob of Muslim men chanting “Allah Akbar” had vandalised a German church on New Year’s Eve, the story was shared thousands of times across social media platforms before finally being debunked by German police a few days later. In a year that saw “post-truth” nominated as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, it remains important to recognise how damaging even the smallest a...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Those of us who spent our childhoods and adolescence partaking in school plays will understand how formative it can be to stand on stage and pretend to be someone else. I for one can remember the confidence I took from playing a role that held little or no resemblance to myself. Sometimes it is only under the guise and identity of someone else that we are truly able to learn about ourselves. Toni Erdmann, which plays...

By Leslie Byron Pitt @afrofilmviewer The first question which left my lips after viewing The Wailing was a simple one? Why so Long? Na Hong-jin’s (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea) third feature is by no means a bad movie. Far from it. Like many of the more successful Korean exports the West have managed to experience, The Wailing is an often-successful tonal mix of styles which happily shifts and contorts itself around whatever the expression the scene thinks would suit...

By Anna Power  @powerpops If you were expecting a glossy biopic of Jackie Kennedy, wife of JFK, first lady and international fashion icon, think again, Pablo Larrain’s film is anything but. It plays more like an up-close and personal examination of a woman in trauma. It’s brutal, jarring and uncomfortable viewing at times. The narrative centers upon Jackie’s (Natalie Portman) interview with Life Magazine’s Theodore H White (Billy Crudup), a week to the day,  after JFK’s assassination. Using grainy 16mm...

By Anna Power @powerpops An extraordinary story, Lion will lock your heart in a vice and squeeze it till all the tears come out and do so without pandering to melodrama. Based on the heartbreaking true story of five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who having pestered his teenage brother Guddu (Priyanka Bose) to let him go with him to look for night work - both boys work to assist their single mother and help feed the family, on this...

by Leslie Byron Pitt Despite critical acclaim Kubo and the Two Strings only just claimed back its relatively small $60 million budget with its box office gross. We shouldn’t always run to the bean counters to try and attain a film's sense of value, but it’s important to notice that out of the four feature films that stop motion company Laika have made, the return has been the weakest. This is despite the kind words that have been bestowed on...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel To the uninitiated, the world Todd Solondz has set out over the course of eight features must appear a baffling one. It’s likely to be just as confusing to those who have stumbled across work stretching back nearly three decades. Wiener-Dog continues his merging of bone-dry humour and startlingly underplayed drama resulting in an anthology piece of varying success. The one constant across four stories is the wiener dog of the title, a passive observer thrown...