Film

By Anna Power @powersfilms Following on from his success with Dallas Buyers Club Jean-Marc Vallee directs Wild, a tale of grief, hurt and healing, literally one step at a time. Reece Witherspoon gives a striking performance as novice, lone-hiker Cheryl Strayed (based on her memoir) who undertook the precipitous 1,100 mile journey through the wilderness as the ill-thought-through solution to a car-crash rock bottom, resulting in the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent divorce. Donning freshly pressed hiking trousers and...

By Anna Power @powersfilms  A simple story about a complicated man, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), the Cambridge mathematician whose unquantifiable contribution to the decoding of Enigma, is a story previously unheralded on screen before The Imitation Game. Based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, the film faithfully portrays the complexity of Turing’s true genius and his immense tenacity and determination to do the impossible by building a machine to decode German communications, effectively shortening the war and...

By Alex Barrett Getting an independent film funded and made has always been, and probably always will be, extremely difficult. There's been much talk of the 'democratisation' of filmmaking and of how the digital 'revolution' has levelled the playing field, enabling films to be made quickly and cheaply. This is true to an extent, but it's also relative. For instance, £150,000 is considered, in filmmaking terms, a 'microbudget' – but while that might be next-to-nothing for a film budget, for...

By Anna Power @powersfilms '71 is a darkly disturbing, intensely evocative, riveting portrayal of a young soldier's experience of war, in the bitterest of conflicts, that of the Northern Ireland troubles. Jack O'Connell (Starred Up) is rapidly emerging as the actor of his generation with his elliptical, highly emotive performance as private Gary Hook, an army new recruit from small town Derbyshire. From children's home to army barracks, his first posting sees his troop rerouted to Belfast due to increasing...

By Anna Power @KitNapz Ida is a profoundly moving, visually mesmerizing coming of age tale, steeped in the shadowy secrecy of post-holocaust, Poland.   At eighteen, Ida, a novitiate, is about to take her vows but before doing so, her mother superior asks her to spend some time with her only relative, long-lost, estranged aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). Ida dutifully, albeit reluctantly, complies only to discover the truth of her own Jewish identity – her real name is Ida Lebenstein,...

By Anna Power @KitNapz Pride is a funny, heartwarming, celebratory film about the real-life union between gay rights campaigners in London and striking Welsh miners. Set in the 80’s, depicting a time when the harsh policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government made insurgents out of the least likely, crossing societal divisions of class, race, gender and sexual identity, when politically the only side to be on was - any side but Thatcher’s side. Throw into the mix a stonking 80’s soundtrack...

By Anna Power @KitNapz In Two Days, One Night we are taken on a Homeric Odyssey of sorts. The Dardenne Brothers (Rosetta, The Kid with a Bike) are masters of subtlety, telling simple stories about ordinary working class people, which reveal more about us as human beings, than thought possible. Here we encounter Sandra (Marion Cotillard) a blue-collar worker, emerging from a severe bout of clinical depression, only to be told that her job is no longer viable, an unfathomable...

By Adam Clark @AdamClarkers Luc Besson’s Lucy treads the line between ambition and wilful eccentricity with mixed results. The set-up is fairly simple - Scarlett Johansson gets mixed up with a gang in Taiwan, where she becomes the unwilling drug mule for a new superdrug intended for the European party scene. However the drug has the potential to unlock ‘100% of the human cerebral capacity’ and transforms Johansson from naive victim to superhuman killer seeking both revenge and survival. The...

By John S. Locke I first saw Robin Williams on ‘Happy Days’, the classic American TV sitcom when I was a wide-eyed kid – he was electric! He was like a comedy Elvis! He was a comedic whirlwind – he changed comedy completely from that point onwards. This lightning rod, who zapped out of the big telly box and lit up our small 1970′s North Walian living room, was a laughter bolt which energised, enthralled and entertained like none before him. He literally...