Vivarium is a descent into madness. It did my head in. Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) are a happy couple. They’re considering buying a house together. One day they wander into a shop displaying cardboard models of the same perfectly manicured home. A strange real estate salesman – Martin (Jonathan Aris) – implores…
Youthful anarchy is at the heart of Beats. This largely black-and-white film is set in a working-class Scottish town in 1994. The story takes place against the background of a British government proposal to ban amplified “beat” music at unlicensed raves. The film centres on the friendship between two teenagers who approach life very differently….
Fear is a powerful motivator. As we’re seeing at the moment, decisions based in fear can have profound effects. Writer-director Riley Stearns explores similarly dire consequences – along with the price of toxic masculinity – in The Art of Self-Defense. Mild-mannered Casey Davies (Jesse Eisenberg) lives alone with his dachshund and works as an accountant….
Weird and wacky Australian film noir, Burning Kiss is a psychedelic whodunnit in reverse. We know who committed the crime, but a disgraced former detective concocts a story to make himself look like a hero. It’s been six years since a hit-and-run incident put ex-cop Edmond Bloom (Richard Mellick) in a wheelchair and took the…
Jean Reno. The ever-calm actor is usually associated with roles such as a police detective, a gangster or an assassin. The quiet-looking Frenchman has a specific appearance that fits perfectly with such roles. Strange but true. I have only recently seen the film Léon: The Professional. Without a doubt the very best that Jean Reno…
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) is a respectful documentary chronicling the life of Jiro Ono, the most famous sushi chef in Tokyo. For 75 of his 85 years, Jiro has been perfecting the art of making sushi – and the pursuit continues. He works from sunrise to well beyond sunset, tasting all the produce, meticulously…
True crime fans have found a home in Netflix, which is firmly the go-to streaming platform for documentaries and movies based on real life cases of the missing and murdered. Lost Girls focuses on American sex worker Shannan Gilbert, who went missing late one night in 2010 in Long Island after fleeing from a client’s…
Frozen meets Shrek in Onward, the latest adventure from the Disney-Pixar stable. The hype around this film has been understandably muted; but even though it’s a little “off”, it still delivers exactly what most audiences will want. Like Shrek, the Onward is set in a kind of split dimension in which the world of fantasy…
Let me start in a cheeky and derogatory tone. Let’s take Jack Sparrow, promote him to be an eloquent university professor teaching literature and tell him that he’s terminally ill. If you watch the movie The Professor (the original movie title was ‘Richard Says Goodbye‘) with a dismissive attitude, you could utter such a statement….
More twisted weirdness from New Zealand filmmaker Ant Timpson, best known for his work as a producer on gory horror films like the 2012 horror anthology The ABCs of Death. Timpson makes his feature directorial debut with this irreverent, nasty and darkly comic thriller about a young man who tries to reconnect with his estranged…
