LFF 2016: La La Land *****
It’s a film you will remember for how it made you feel, rather than for any meaningful storyline. La La Land offers a kind of therapy in a cold, unsure world, a guaranteed spiritual boost.
Tag: Ryan Gosling
The Big Short ****
Enlightens, appalls and thrills in equal measure. It does rely on a modicum of interest in the banking crisis, but it has far more opportunity to grab an audience’s imagination with the all-star cast it delivers.
The Place Beyond The Pines***
Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance’s second film, The Place Beyond The Pines, offers a similar moving and volatile storyline of familiar relationships as his latter. The comparison is made all the more apparent by the reappearance of ‘man of the moment’ Ryan Gosling who has made an art of brooding in quiet, pained expression of …
LFF 2011: The Ides Of March ***
George Clooney’s fourth directorial film, The Ides of March, is an enticing ode to yesteryear political thrillers, but it’s also a delightful exercise in intense acting exchanges played out by his stellar main cast of Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Although Clooney stars in this, it’s in a supporting capacity. His talent …
Drive ****
Beginning like an updated version of Gone in Sixty Seconds, Bronson director Nicolas Winding Refn’s new action drama Drive puts its slick wheels in motion for a supposed heist flick, but settles into a dark ride of disturbing but exhilarating control. Driver (Ryan Gosling) is a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman for …
Fright Night (3D) ****
Craig Gillespie’s last and probably only memorable film to date was the touchingly quirky Lars and the Real Girl in 2007, starring Ryan Gosling as a delusional guy who has a relationship with a life-like doll. This showed the makings of a great director of twisted unconventionality in the heart of suburbia – kind of …
LFF: Blue Valentine – 4*
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 …