Tag: Cinema
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My Worst Films of 2018.
A year of countless trips to the cinema involves many a disappointment, with 2018 proving no less cinematically woeful than others. This year, duds were released not only on the big screen but on VOD platforms too. Now, audiences have the (dis)pleasure of being bored to death, angered and let down by new releases from…
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A Woman Captured.
With astonishing access to a truly horrifying issue, A Woman Captured is as astounding as a directorial debut gets. Formerly a film school student in Budapest, Bernadett Tuza-Ritter embarks on an emotional journey with house slave Marish, who has resided with an abusive family for over a decade. Tuza-Ritter’s access is the most remarkable element of the…
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Documentaries Changing the World: A Northern Soul
Sean McAllister returned to his hometown of Hull in 2017 after being appointed Creative Director of City of Culture. Residing back with his parents after years spent all over the world making award winning documentaries, McAllister now faced a new kind of challenge. Over the course of the year McAllister would attempt to engage his…
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Skate Kitchen.
Crystal Moselle’s follow up to debut The Wolfpack is being praised as a docudrama-hybrid; a scripted, fictional narrative woven into the director’s real-life experiences with an all-female Manhattan skate collective. Loner Camille, lives an isolated existence across the water in Long Island. In the film’s opening minutes Camille is already in hospital after an eye-watering skating accident.…
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Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.
A collaboration between old friends from art school, Matangi / Maya / M.I.A. is not your average music doc. Most obviously because the music career of Sri Lankan born and Brixton bred rapper M.I.A. is only one component in a film exploring her beginnings, her inspirations, her activism and her global success in the early 2000s…
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American Animals
Dramatised non-fiction is old territory for director Bart Layton whose first feature documentary The Imposter included tense re-enactment. His latest work takes things even further in an attempt to intertwine documentary and drama even more tightly. American Animals, based on a shambolic real-life heist at an American University in 2004, is for the most part a…
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The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
Adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s book, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is the second feature from director Desiree Akhavan. In 2014, Akhavan explored the complexities of a modern woman’s sexuality (simultaneously winning over indie film audiences) in Appropriate Behaviour – a film which refreshingly focused on bisexuality – more specifically in conflict with family heritage, culture and…
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BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee’s latest, loosely based on the early career of police-officer Ron Stallworth, opens with an icon scene from 1939’s Gone With the Wind. An iconic moment in American cinema, a distressed Scarlett O’Hara is wading through a sea of injured civil war soldiers. The camera gradually draws out, revealing the vast extent of the wounded.…
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Heathers: 30 Years On.
Popularity and cruelty have gone hand in hand since the dawn of the high-school movie. Every American coming-of-age romp explores high school’s twisted social hierarchy. Mean Girls, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Grease and The Breakfast Club; these movies all explore the inner politics of the playground within an age old status quo. A dog-eat-dog world, high-school has never been more…
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The Escape.
On the surface, Tara seems to have everything any mother and wife could ever want; two young children, an attentive husband, a beautiful house, two cars and financial security. With her husband earning enough money to support them both, Tara’s days are spent getting the children to and from the local primary school, tending to…
Hannah McHaffie 