Film

By Michael McNulty Jeff Nichols firmly established himself as a talented director with his 2011 psychological thriller, Take Shelter, and his 2012 coming of age story, Mud. But, his first film, the often overlooked slow burn feud thriller, Shotgun Stories, released in 2007, is where it all began. The imaginatively named Son (Michael Shannon), Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon) are the first set of offspring of Cleaman Hayes, a former drunk who after kicking the booze and finding...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP In the last couple of years, almost as a reaction to the overproduced and sickly Twilight franchise, there have been a number of vampire films that have reimagined the genre in a more realistic and creative way. With Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lover’s Left Alive and the more recent A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night the real potential of vampire tales has really been shown. Made on a low budget with relatively unknown actors, it...

Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence star in Darren Aronofsky's Mother out on September 15th. Creepy as you'd expect from the director of Black Swan the couple have some unusual houseguests in the form of Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris resulting in some very weird visions and dreams for Jennifer Lawrence and Bardem begins to act really strange. Criticised for the ridiculous age-gap between Jennifer Lawrence (26) and Bardem (48) - come on Hollywood this is getting creepy and not in...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Tom of Finland beings in the Second World War, where Touko Laaksonen (Pekka Strang) is serving as an anti-aircraft officer and is exploring his sexuality. After the war ends Laaksonen returns to the house he shares with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) and begins to draw erotic images. Due to laws that saw his pictures as pornographic and illegal it was hard for them to be sold but slowly they start to make their way across...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP A Ghost Story follows Casey Affleck, an independent musician, and his wife Rooney Mara who live together in a small suburban house. They have an ordinary life and are a very normal couple until one day Affleck is killed in a car crash outside their home. While lying dead in hospital Affleck rises from a clinic bed and walks out underneath a bed sheet. After Mara moves out of the house, the ghost is left to...

A shop celebrating the wizarding world of Harry Potter has taken opened on the street that inspired the series' famous Diagon Alley. Diagon House has taken over from a brush shop that stood in the cobbled-stoned street for 101 years to sell memorabilia to Harry potter fans. Victoria Street in Edinburgh is thought to be JK Rowling's inspiration for Diagon Alley -- the wizarding alley and shopping area in the fantasy novel series. Winding up two floors of stairs the...

By Michael McNulty Ousmane Sembene began his career as a story teller in literature, writing a number of successful novels which were published in France.  After Senegal gained its independence from France in 1960, Sembene turned his attention to filmmaking and recognizing the universality of the moving image he travelled to Moscow where he studied filmmaking at Gorky Studios.  A year later he returned to Senegal and began his filmmaking career, developing into one of Africa’s most prominent and important...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain It may seem unfair to compare every new racing documentary to Asif Kapadia’s Senna, but since its 2011 release there have been a number of films that have covered the sport. Rush, Lauda: The Untold Story, 1, and Senna vs Brundle have all to a certain degree tried to recapture both the heart-pounding thrills and emotion of Kapadia’s film. The latest Formula One documentary Williams does cover a similar subject area but instead focuses on a...

By Michael McNulty Gareth Tunley’s debut feature, The Ghoul, is a brooding, atmospheric psychological thriller. Blending a dreamlike, occult narrative with suburban noir, Tunely, a Ben Wheatley regular, has made a film that feels part Kill List, with a smattering of Taxi Driver and a Lynch-ian twist. Chris (Tom Meeten), a homicide detective, is called down to London to investigate a mysterious double murder. The two killed are said, by forensic experts, to have continued to approach their killer after...