Film

Eric Judor brings us a slight, satirical comedy in his third feature, Problemos. Urbanite couple, Victor (Eric Judor) and Jeanne (Celia Rosich), with their young daughter Margaux travel to a commune to visit ex yoga instructor and old friend of Jeanne’s, Jean-Paul (Michel Nabokoff), for a weekend.  The camp is full of born again hippies sporting dodgy haircuts, djembes, and flimsy new age, socially conscious beliefs.  We quickly learn that they are a collective who have rejected city living and...

By Jim Mackney De plus belle is a French rom-com by debut director, Anne-Gaëlle Daval, and it is a curious take on the romantic comedy genre, focusing much more on the sense of self of the main character Lucie (Florence Foresti), as she battles with the physical and mental side effects of having breast cancer. Admittedly this doesn’t sound a particularly happy area to mine for that usual light touch that romantic comedies aim for but De plus belle manages...

Seen by many to be William Friedkin’s overlooked masterpiece, Sorcerer was a box office flop and was met with rather mixed reviews upon its original release. After the budget ballooned to around £22 million, the film struggled to recoup half that at the box office. The critical response wasn’t much better with Leslie Halliwell going as far as saying that it was ‘truly insulting’. Perhaps it was because Sorcerer could not compete with Star Wars that opened the same summer or that it did not meet...

By Michael McNulty Samuel Fuller has become somewhat of a regular feature of the Forgotten Friday Series, but there is something so indelibly magnificent about his canon of films that make not making every Friday instalment a Fuller film an act of sheer willpower.  In fact, it should be mandatory that everybody have a Fuller box-set sitting on their DVD shelf that they can reach for whenever they are in doubt as to what to watch.  This is the man...

There’s nothing better than a trip to the cinema - the smell of freshly popped popcorn and the excitement of going to watch a film you’ve waited months to see. You sit through each gripping trailer in anticipation, munching your way through your cinema snackbox. But while you were sipping on that jumbo-sized soft drink, did you pay attention to the forthcoming film releases? Cineworld has created a brainteaser of a puzzle to test your film buff knowledge. Set in...

By Sam Inglis Films menace us in many different ways. We’ve been scared by ghosts, by aliens, by monsters, vampires, zombies, demons and supernatural murderers. I like films with all of these threats in them, but the ones that scare me, that truly get under my skin, are serial killer films. Dracula, Pennywise, The Wolfman, Damien, Sadako and Freddy Kruger are all very different threats, but they all have one thing in common: you know they’re not real. When you see...

The Silence of the Lambs is a piece of classic horror cinema, and in the great canon of Hollywood horror it sits happily alongside The Exorcist and Nosferatu. The film is being re-released as part of the “BFI Thriller: Who Can You Trust” season and has been artfully up-scaled and rendered in 4K. The visuals are enhanced and do not look that out of place with modern Hollywood productions, aside from the obvious slight dull look to the colours. It...

By Michael McNulty If you’re looking for a poorly sketched portrait of Paul Gauguin, then Edouard Deluc’s film, Gauguin, might be just the thing for you.  This quasi-biography is a tepid attempt at painting the artists life in the romantic brush strokes that he surely would have liked to have been remember by. A bedraggled Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) is desperate to leave Paris, “there’s not a face or a landscape worth painting,” he passionately explains to his paintbrush wielding brethren. ...

Taking seven days to shoot and incorporating 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is one of the most memorable and iconic sequences in cinematic history. In 78/52 director Alexandre O. Philippe looks behind the curtain of Hitchcock’s most famous murder. Joining him is an impressive ensemble of directors, editors, actors, and film historians that includes Bret Easton Ellis, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elijah Wood, and Guillermo de Toro. Each has their own different experience encountering Psycho and each...