The 2019 German Film Festival is currently getting underway around the country. The festival aims to showcase the best new German cinema across all genres with a curated selection of 31 films. It all kicks off with Balloon (Ballon) by Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig. This film is a stranger-than-fiction story about two families trying to escape…
Sicario is a Spanish word used to describe the hitmen associated with Mexican drug cartels. Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) was a gripping action crime drama set on the border between the US and Mexico. The sequel, Day of the Soldado, doesn’t disappoint. The film is propelled by two antihero protagonists who venture deep into the…
Having reformed with their original line-up back in 2013, Veruca Salt has returned with their new LP, Ghost Notes. This is the first record featuring Louise Post and Nina Gordon, since 1997’s Eight Arms to Hold You. For all review purposes, this record could be and probably should receive a shrug of the shoulders but…
West Side Story has a chequered history. The musical by Jerome Robbins (first staged in 1957) met with wide acclaim, as did the 1961 film version directed by Robbins and Robert Wise. But it hasn’t aged well. The depiction of the Puerto Rican characters was always fraught; but the original film’s largely white-washed casting (Rita…
Having just sat through The World According to Dinosaurs, I am sorry to say I can’t really tell you much about the narrative, save for an extinction event. A big part of the reason is the verbiage in the work was frequently drowned out. Frankly, the sound mix was appalling. From the get-go, the narrator was swamped…
J G Ballard’s prescient dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise was a bleak allegory for the class warfare and decline of civilization and the breakdown of society. Ballard wrote the novel in the 70s during a period of tumultuous upheaval in the social fabric of Britain before the economic downturn and rampant unionism drove Thatcher’s conservatives into…
French psychedelic trio SLIFT started things off back in 2017 when they released their debut EP, Space Is The Key, via one of our favorite labels in Howlin’ Banana Records. Their debut LP, La Planète Inexplorée, then followed in 2018 and found the band exploring their garage psych sound and taking more time to experiment…
Talk about creative writing that starts out in one tone and suddenly becomes something entirely unexpected. That’s what you get if you know nothing about American Ultra when you enter the cinema. Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) spends most of his time getting stoned, sitting behind the register of the local convenience store and writing a…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 11 June 2021. Rio is the fifth album from the sensational French jazz pianist Florian Pellissier. It was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studio (New Jersey, USA), fulfilling one of Pellissier’s long-held dreams. The album was mixed by Jordan…
Ben Affleck isn’t exactly one of my favorite actors. Not that he’s such a terrible actor, but he’s such a smooth guy who manages to play in some outstanding movies every time. Movies that didn’t leave an everlasting impression on me anyway. In retrospect, it’s really a giant list I’ve seen him in, such as…
