Tag: Movie Review
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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…
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Apostasy.
Stern, tight-lipped mother and devoted Jehovah’s Witness Ivanna is raising her two teenage daughters within the strict, secular religion to which she has committed her life. Each daughter carries with them weighty doubts and when one sister falls away from the faith, Ivanna is faced with pressure to minimise contact with her in order to…
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Whitney.
Nick Broomfield and Kevin Macdonald, both giants of the British documentary industry, have each explored the self-destructive life and intense global career of Whitney Houston. Almost exactly a year after Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me comes Macdonald’s simplistically entitled Whitney – this time signed off by Houston’s family and estate. Where Broomfield’s limited access meant he drew largely…
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Mid-Year Round Up – 2018.
As the film industry continues to reel from the Weinstein scandal, 2018 has been a reasonably strong year for movies but more importantly a particularly loud and triumphant one for women and our ongoing activism for equality at all levels. So far my current favourite films of the year boast real variety and demonstrate particularly…
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McQueen.
London bad boy turned fashion designer extraordinaire, Lee Alexander McQueen boldly conquered the world of fashion in his late twenties. His violent, dramatic designs earned him international acclaim and at the mere age of twenty-seven he found himself chief designer at Givenchy, remaining in the position for the following five years. In 2010, McQueen committed suicide…
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Hereditary.
Following the death of her estranged mother, Toni Collette’s Annie secretly attends grievance support groups, where she describes her mother as manipulative, secretive and barely her mother by the end. Despite the distance and bad blood between them, Annie and her family quickly find the death of their matriarch starts to unravel the family dynamics…
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Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018: 5 Must See Movies.
Returning for its 25th edition, Sheffield Doc/Fest will be taking over Sheffield city centre in just 24 days. One of the largest documentary film festivals in the world, it consists of a programme of almost 200 films along with the Alternate Realities programme – exhibiting 25 virtual and interactive reality projects from across the world. With big…
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Tully.
Three years after an astonishing feature debut – Juno – writer Diablo Cody gave us the criminally underrated Young Adult in 2011. The story of a high school princess struggling to find value at life in her early thirties after realising she may have just peaked at prom queen. The film’s blunt, cynical writing was excelled to even greater…
Hannah McHaffie 