Film

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...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain  Maud Lewis remains one of Canada’s best known folk artists. Despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis that restricted her movement she still managed to produce her much loved paintings. At one point her fame grew to the extent that she was featured in magazines and on television, and even sold a painting to the then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Maudie opens in provincial Nova Scotia during the 1930s, where Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) is frustrated at the lack of...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain  Stories about the Second World War are so ingrained in our minds and daily practice that it can seem as if there is nothing to add to the discourse of this period. As a result, it is always a pleasure for a story to separate itself from the pantheon of films, books, and tales that have tried to cover the period before and perhaps even more exciting when someone tries to challenge the preconceptions we have about...