LFF 2017: The Square ****
The Square likes to hold the supposed ‘aspirational’ middle-class Scandinavian lifestyle to account and provoke it in a darkly sinister fashion. Östlund achieves this goal in a beautifully scripted and well-crafted film.
Tag: Dominic West
LFF 2014: Testament Of Youth ****
Vera Brittain’s WWI memoir of the same name is ideal subject matter to adapt for the big screen. Wartime and one woman’s inner strength (as well as beauty) is a heady mixture. Screenwriter Juliette Towhidi is sensitive to the original material, wanting Brittain to be a champion for women while very much innocent and blindly …
John Carter ***
Writer-director Andrew Stanton tries his hand at live action this time, putting some of his fun Pixar magic from the likes of award-winning Finding Nemo and Wall-E into John Carter, an other-worldly adventure staged on Mars – or Barsoom, as adapted from Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work, A Princess of Mars. Whatever faults this …
LFF 2011: The Awakening ***
Writer-director Nick Murphy’s first feature film, The Awakening, is a bold step into the well-trodden genre of horror. Thankfully, Murphy has mixed supernatural intrigue with historical fact to bolster his story’s significance, adopting an old-fashioned ghost-hunting theme to its investigative concept, without relying on modern-day effects for big scares. Set in 1921 England, there is …
Johnny English Reborn ****
Cynics might be too quick to mock the news of another Johnny English film. But Johnny English Reborn is one example of a sequel that knocks spots off the original, which admittedly wasn’t hard, purely because those involved have had eight years to mull over the mistakes made in the first to now offer a …