Reviews in a nutshell
The latest art-house drama and 2010 London Film Festival entry from Joanna Hogg remains loyal to her fascinating and confident film-making style of lengthy character improvisation. Archipelago is certainly not to everyone’s taste, almost Cinéma vérité in nature, but without depicting real-life events. It’s also a very slow burner that gives the opportunity to ‘people …
East Is East (1999) was a breath of British comedy fresh air, a playful and broad-minded but poignantly comical look at the issues of integrating Pakistani culture in 1970s’ Britain, as portrayed through the lives of one Anglo-Pakistani family based in Salford, Greater Manchester. It had tears, laughter and frustrations, triggered through a series of …
With recent news of 200 RBS bankers possibly getting £1 million pound bonuses each, surely the last thing you’d want to see is a film about these smug fat cats and the global financial meltdown they helped cause. There will be popcorn directed at the screens for sure. But like a taunt fictional thriller – …
Alex Garland’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, is what film festivals and awards ceremonies were made for. Even though the film of the same name gracefully opened the 2010 BFI London Film Festival in October, delivering an example of understated, ethereal British elegance in its style and cinematography, it has …
Like its title, this is a story full of determination and fighting spirit, set in gritty and meagre surroundings, which unsurprisingly, bolster our empathy for its colourful array of characters. Considering The Fighter has got a few Oscar nods and a Golden Globe for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, alarm bells start ringing of yet …
Javier Bardem receiving a Best Actor Oscar nod for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s haunting Biutiful, after his Cannes Film Festival Best Actor triumph was hardly a great revelation to most. The haunting film in true woeful Iñárritu style, and one set for the first time in his native Spain, is a definite awards contender by any …
Where did all the love go? Writer/director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is a super sensitive and tragically taunt tale of a marriage that implodes slowly over time, after one of the sweetest wooing moments seem on film in many years involving a ukulele. From the offset it you feel uneasy, that things in the visually …
It’s hard not to be a tad cynical about this Oscar-paint-by-numbers offering from director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray because that’s just what Conviction is: a shamelessly wanton Academy Awards contender with a double-statuette-winning leading lady in Hilary Swank to boot. It is, nevertheless, watchable. Conviction has the melodrama, the struggle, and the real-life …
At any other time in recent years, a film about the Royal Family would only prick the interest of some at the UK box office. But with two royal weddings on the cards this year, there seems to be renewed domestic interest in our famous British family. Tom Hooper’s film, The King’s Speech, could not …
