Film

The Red Turtle opens with the sight of a nameless man struggling to stay on-board his small boat in a huge storm. After he wakes on a deserted island, he finds water and fruit to live off, but decides to leave and builds a bamboo raft to sail away on. Each time he tries to leave his boat is destroyed by a red turtle and he is left stranded on the island once more. One night he sees the turtle...

By Linda Marric For an animation film primarily aimed at children, Spark: A Space Tale seems to spend an unusual amount of time trying to please its adult viewers. With multiple attempts at referencing anything from Stars Wars to WALL·E ( Andrew Stanton, 2008), director Aaron Wooley tries his very best to inject some much needed life into the narrative, but sadly falls short of entirely convincing. With a voice cast which includes Jessica Biel, Hilary Swank, Patrick Stewart and...

By Linda Marric First of all let’s start with the good news, because despite earlier misgiving about yet another outing, there is no doubt that the fifth film in the Pirates of The Caribbean franchise is far more coherent than its most recent predecessor. Yes Salazar’s Revenge is way more knowing and far better crafted than On Stranger Tides (2011), but that is not to say that this latest instalment brings anything new or original to the usual seafaring shenanigans....

There was a moment of brief dismay during this year’s Oscar ceremony, when it suddenly looked as if a brutish form of populism would once again break our optimism. For many, the awards were already a foregone conclusion, the early momentum swinging, as expected, towards Damien Chazelle’s delightful La La Land & Barry Jenkins’ compelling Moonlight. So when Mel Gibson’s barbarous wartime blockbuster Hacksaw Ridge earned a surprise win for Best Editing, it momentarily planted a thought that – despite...

Comedian Demetri Martin once said that “if you put on flip flops, you’re saying: ‘Hope I don’t get chased today’.” Growing up in Oakland, where just taking a wrong turn in a bad neighbourhood could lead to a beating, or worse, Brandon (Jahking Guillory), a spindly & sensitive soul in his mid-teens, lives an impoverished existence where the girls ignore him and even his two best friends, Albert and Rico (Christopher Jordan Wallace & Christopher Meyer), pick on him. On...

By Michael McNulty We fade in from black and are travelling down a dark country road. Trees with stiff, twisted branches flash by. The accompanying carnival music is beautifully eerie, conjuring images of merry- go-rounds and subtly hinting at the circular existence of the lives of the characters we are about to be introduced to in George Franju’s classic film, Les Yeux Sans Visage. A woman drives a Citröen 2CV, her face a canvas of anxiety. In the back there...

By Linda Marric It isn’t often that you come across a factual feature film which is capable of hitting its audiences the way Rahul Jain’s Machines does. The film which offers a look into to the intricacies of modern day labour, not only manages to wake in its viewers a sense of solidarity towards its subjects, but it also manages to ignite feelings of anger and dismay at the dehumanising conditions they have grown accustomed to at the hands of...

By Linda Marric King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or to give it its full name, “lock stock and a whole load of Arthurian cockney nonsense”, is the latest offering from Guy Ritchie. Directed by Ritchie himself and staring Charlie Hunnam, King Arthur is not so much an epic fantasy adventure, but more of a mammoth production of boorish, noisy and not to mention unnecessarily silly going-ons. Despite earlier misgivings, the film opens with a spectacular CGI infused battle which...

By James McAllister “Our system is rotten. It doesn’t reward honest politicians who vote with their conscious; it rewards rats, who are willing to sell out their country to keep their noses in the trough.” Miss Sloane may have been made back in early 2016, when the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was more an outlandish nightmare than a chilling reality, but some 15 months on, its release could not be timelier. In a new era of ignorance, here...