News from CineVue

13 articles

2 hours ago

★★★★☆In the summer of 2004, a pair of American comedies arrived at the box office within just two weeks of each other. The first was Dodgeball, which starred the Saturday Night Live giants of the day and quickly became widely-quoted. The second was Anchorman. Almost an entire decade later, it's difficult to recall a time when Adam McKay's picture was an also-ran trailing in Dodgeball's wake. And yet, while the memory of Rawson Marshall Thurber's Ben Stiller-starring underdog story has faded somewhat, Anchorman has gradually grown to stratospheric proportions. So many of its lines have now become part of the cinematic lexicon - a word-of-mouth cult hit writ large.

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- CineVue UK

6 hours ago

★★☆☆☆In Bobcat Goldthwait's God Save America follow-up Willow Creek (2013), Alexie Gilmore and Bryce Johnson play Kelly and Jim, a young couple heading out into the great outdoors to look for the legendary figure of Bigfoot. Kelly is an aspiring actress and wryly sceptical about the expedition, while Jim is a goofy enthusiast pursuing a childhood fascination. On the way, the pair interview creepy Sasquatch experts, ambivalent eye-witnesses and singing hill-billies. They stay at the Bigfoot Motel, eat Bigfoot burgers and visit the museum to gape at the pictures and snigger at the models. Their final destination is on a patch of land near to Willow Creek, where the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage was shot.

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- CineVue UK

6 hours ago

★★★★☆A quiet revelation at Cannes last year, Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin (2013) is a stripped back revenge thriller that cruises down the central reservation of the genre, veering wildly between tense thrills and a series of alluringly awkward acts of violence to achieve instantaneous cult veneration. Behind a haze of steam we observe a bearded man submerged in the bathtub of a quintessential American middle-class home. The serenity of this scene is soon dashed one the house's rightful owners return and we're transported to a life far removed from this idyllic image of suburban life. The man is Dwight (Macon Blair), a homeless outcast sleeping in an a rusted Pontiac and surviving on scraps salvaged from dumpsters.

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- CineVue UK

8 hours ago

★★★★★With Violent Saturday (1955), the recent Richard Fleischer reappraisal comes full-circle. A brazenly eclectic studio man who directed films as disparate as the Tony Curtis-starring The Boston Strangler (1968) and fantasy epic Conan the Destroyer (1984), Fleischer is near-impossible to pin down. But a few notable European reissues as well as a high- profile retrospective at the 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival have brought him back into the spotlight for dedicated cinéastes. Violent Saturday is not only his finest work, it's one of the best American films of the fifties; a picture that repurposes the forms of the past to create the genre sensibilities of the future.

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- CineVue UK

9 hours ago

★★★☆☆Made in 1973, a whole three years before his breakthrough Stephen King adaptation Carrie, Brian De Palma's Sisters (previously released as Blood Sisters in the UK and now available on DVD and Blu-ray through Arrow Video) begins with a mock quiz show called 'Peeping Tom', in which a female participant wins a set of steak knives. Right there, we have the key De Palma obsessions; voyeurism stabbed through with violence, all played out with a healthy slice of self-aware humour. This being De Palma, we also need the Hitchcock influence which - with a late score by Bernard Hermann - occasionally oversteps the mark into straight pastiche rather than nuanced, reverent homage.

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- CineVue UK

10 hours ago

★★★★☆Some films could only have been made in England, during a certain era and with a particular cast. The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) - newly released by StudioCanal to mark its sixtieth anniversary - is one such film. Though its popularity led to a string of sequels throughout the 1950s and 60s - as well as an unfortunate revival in 2007 - it is the original film, directed by Frank Launder and starring Alistair Sim, George Cole and Joyce Grenfell, which remains the archetypal celluloid visualisation of artist Ronald Searle's comic creation. It's the new term at St. Trinian's - the girl's public school in the heart of England's home-counties, where anyone, other than the pupils themselves, fears to go.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 6:36 AM, PDT

★★★★☆ Hot on the heels of his previous feature-length offering, Cannes select As I Lay Dying, James Franco made his directorial bow on the Venice Lido with last year's Child of God (2013), a Gothic tale of violence, perversion and madness in the hill country of Tennessee, adapted from American writer Cormac McCarthy's celebrated third novel. Out now on DVD in the UK, Scott Haze plays Lester Ballard, a solitary, unhinged individual who feels he has been robbed of his father's land. Ballard roams the woods hunting rabbits, stealing chickens and muttering and cursing to himself. One day, he spies on a couple making out in a car and goes on to discover finds a half-naked woman beneath the canopy.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 5:54 AM, PDT

★★☆☆☆"Without it, life means nothing" according to a quote that fills the screen in the opening moments of British director Shan Khan's twisting London-set thriller, Honour (2014). Attempting to straddle the potentially conflicting identities of cultural expose and nerve-shredding cat-and-mouse chase, it revolves around the horrifying practice of so called 'honour-killings' in Muslim communities and families. Reportedly on the rise here in the UK, Khan's film seeks to shine a light onto these dark slayings whilst providing popcorn entertaining. The ambition is certainly a noble one, but sadly it does not quite work on this occasion, with both message and tension hamstrung by unconvincing characters.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 4:52 AM, PDT

★★★★★A mind-boggling twelve years in the making, Richard Linklater's quietly monumental new film, Boyhood (2014), somehow manages to dwarf his decades-straddling Before series in almost every conceivable way. Following the maturation of six-year-old Mason (a constant Ellar Coltrane) all the way up to his first day at college, never before has a coming-of-age tale been played out on such a grand, vast canvas. For once, at least, the early hyperbole is entirely justified. It's difficult to think of a recent American indie - or mainstream offering, for that matter - that comes close to equalling the wild, childlike ambition on display here, which makes it by some distance the best in show at this year's Berlinale.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 4:41 AM, PDT

★★★★☆Having carved out a career with music documentaries like 2008's We Dreamed America, director Alex Walker dips his toes into waters new with debut feature Fossil (2014), a psychological thriller that follows a couple on holiday in the south of France whilst they attempt to revitalise their dull marriage. Paul (John Sack) and Camilla (Edith Bucko) arrive at their picturesque holiday cottage surrounded by a thick atmospheric cloud. Words clash and their worlds collide as the pair continue to repeat their loveless, formulaic routine. The holiday is supposedly a chance for the couple to reignite the spark in their relationship, but each laboured romantic attempt endeavours only to tear the couple further apart.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 4:25 AM, PDT

★★☆☆☆Quentin Tarantino last year lauded Big Bad Wolves (2013), the second feature from Israeli filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado (following on from their well-received 2010 debut, Rabies), as his favourite film of 2013 and it's easy to see why he embraced it so resoundingly. The directing duo have been schooled in the Hitchcockian, early-De Palma school of sustained tension, and those scenes in the film are punctuated by moments of unsettling, gleefully vicious gore, served with a side of jet black humour. But for all the well- orchestrated, transgressive sparks, there's an inescapable hollowness to Big Bad Wolves that didn't perpetrate their outstanding inaugural offering.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 4:03 AM, PDT

★★★★☆A nihilistic examination of how patriarchy is fundamental to social oppression through the interrogation of defined gender roles, Claire Denis' Bastards (2013) is a post-modern film noir that feels like observing the world through two black eyes. Paris has never looked so ugly, with Denis shrouding the ornate architecture of the rain-soaked Parisian streets with an oppressive sense of despair. It's in stark contrast to the sweeping vistas and stifling humidity of her 2009 postcolonial thriller White Material, yet the governing sense of insecurity remains just as potent. Clues are fed to the audience like a trail of breadcrumbs, with French naval officer Marco (Vincent Lindon) our guide through this world of depravity.

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- CineVue UK

28 April 2014 2:19 AM, PDT

★★★★★Drifting away from his dialogue-heavy and tightly-wound financial crisis drama debut Margin Call (2011), J.C. Chandor's sophomore directorial feature All Is Lost (2013) is a stripped down and incredibly gripping story of one man's struggle for survival after his sailboat is damaged whilst caught adrift 1700 nautical miles from the Sumatra Straits. Casting ageless cinematic nice guy and Sundance Kid Robert Redford as the film's sole character (labelled 'Our Man' in the credits), Chandor fleshes out his initial 31-page treatment and swaps standardised approaches to narrative and characterisation for an intense look at deteriorating mortality and humanity's unfettered survival instincts.

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- CineVue UK

13 articles

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