Category: Film

  • Ricki and the Flash.

    We first meet Ricki (and the Flash) in a Californian bar where they perform Tom Petty’s American Girl to the boozing onlookers. The sequence is alive with the sound of fingers on strings, and convincing echoes and acoustic reactions that one would expect from the surrounding architecture. Meryl Streep’s own vocals fill your ears joyously…

  • Cartel Land.

    Danger and documentary have always gone hand in hand. The great masters of the genre have always strived to put their art before their safety. Matthew Heineman takes risk to a new level in Cartel Land, proving himself to be made of the same courageous steel that’s present within the likes of Werner Herzog.  A…

  • Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

    Greg is in his final year of high school. His mother keeps thrusting college guide books under his nose whilst he avoids applying. Greg spends his spare time with Earl – an unlikely companion who he likens to a co-worker rather than a friend. Both spend their spare time making films – in the form…

  • Straight Outta Compton.

    In the late 80s and early 90s, rap group N.W.A. were busy changing the hip-hop landscape. The Californian group brought truth and reality to their work which unsettled many due to what was perceived as the glorification of violence, drugs, promiscuity and gang culture. Straight Outta Compton is their Ray, their Bird, their Walk the Line.…

  • Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon.

    The clue’s in the title. Documenting the rise of the National Lampoon magazine and its prominence within outrageous humour and American pop-culture, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon is the tale of one of contemporary American comedies most prolific outlets. Beginning with the satirical journalism and later looking at the presence…

  • Trainwreck.

    Stoner-comedy king Judd Apatow and comedian/writer Amy Schumer uncomfortably join forces to bring us Trainwreck. Unconventional, unpredictable and unapologetic, Trainwreck takes the rom-com formula, a blunt, crass feminist lead and a few of Apatow’s typical conventions and mixes them all up in a cocktail shaker. The result: a mildly-amusing, badly-blended, sharp-tasting sex-comedy which reeks of…

  • A Sinner in Mecca.

    Sexuality, religion, barbarity and spirituality all come under discussion in A Sinner in Mecca – Parvez Sharma’s follow up to his début A Jihad for Love. Being both a homosexual man and devout Muslim, Sharma explores the supposed contradictions of his sexuality in the face of his religion. An extension of his first feature, A…

  • Sunshine Superman.

    Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man meets James Marsh’s Man on Wire in this triumphant documentary about one man with one intense passion for throwing himself off of cliffs; the art of BASE jumping. For Carl Boenish, sky-diving just wasn’t enough of a thrill. His passion for heights and adrenaline enabled him to carve out a career in…

  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

    There are always two sides to every story. Stanley Nelson’s latest documentary explores the rise and fall of The Black Panthers during the civil rights movement; the tyranny they faced, the controversy they caused and the fires they equally stifled and started. This is, of course a film about hideous levels of racism that were…

  • Manglehorn.

    An unsettling study of one man’s loneliness, in the wake of his many mistakes, Manglehorn is the uncertain but occasionally gripping new Al Pacino movie. Director David Gordon Green doesn’t manage to maintain the tenacity or conviction he showed at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival with Joe. Still, developing greatly from his Pineapple Express days, Green…

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