Category: Film Reviews
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Skywalking for all: The Last Jedi soars
The Last Jedi may have been the Star Wars film I really wanted but didn’t know I did until I saw it. Which, on revisiting it on Blu-ray for the Voice, is one of the best compliments I can give it. It remains a complex, tersely written and beautifully performed space opera – which pulls…
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George A. Romero – Land of the Dead reconsidered
Fans of American pulp horror cinema mourn the loss of George A Romero, leaving us after 78 years after a mercifully brief battle with lung cancer. In his early years, Romero went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and stayed there after he graduated, making shorts and TV documentaries, scraping together the cash to make a…
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Reviewing movies
It’s Edinburgh Film Festival time again. Every year, I end up writing loads of reviews all the while wondering how *other people* review movies. I find it difficult, but not impossible to churn out 3 or 4 pieces a day. Here’s how I cope. When watching, I keep scribbling notes, to remind myself of people,…
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The Karate Kid (2010)
Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) is a thin, wiry and likeable 12 year old from Detroit. Leaving America with his mother, who is relocating to Beijing for work (his absent father is mentioned only once, in a memory-laden height chart) – he’s got his work cut out. He can’t speak Mandarin well at all, he’s got…
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Toy Story 3
“When I became a man, I put away childish things.” Toy Story 3 is a dazzlingly confident and magical picture that recalls Paul of Tarsus’s quote, but its makers have never forgotten what it feels like to be children. Pixar Animation Studios continue their near unbroken run of animation masterpieces with a colourful and emotional…
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Blank City
I’m a sucker for documentary films that show me an outlet for unadulterated and exuberant passion. In and among the poverty of Seventies and Eighties New York, Celene Danhier’s remarkable film Blank City gives us a compelling and well worked out cinematic essay on the politics and artistry of the place and time. Ultimately, it…
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Evil In The Time Of Heroes
Ancient Greeks and modern life meets zombies in a timeywimey action horror. Sounds like a laugh, right? Wrong. An ancient evil is released (don’t ask how – the movie doesn’t say), and a handful of survivors must hole up against a gargantuan zombie horde. The streets are deserted, other than the pockets of very fast-on-their-feet…
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The Last Rites of Ransom Pride
“We killed every man, we killed every child, we killed every goddamn dog! And we rode all the women, and when they couldn’t ride no more, we killed them!” Set in Glory, Texas and the Mexican border – The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is a rather dull action Western. The story deals with prostitute…
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Outcast
Outcast is a strange concoction of occult fantasy and social drama – think Ken Loach meets Angel Heart and you’re on the right track. An Irish woman, Mary (Kate Dickie) and her teenage son, Fergal (Niall Bruton) move to a lower-class council estate somewhere in “Bonnie Scotland, Lothian” and try to settle down. They are…
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SoulBoy
Joe McCain (Martin Compston) is a young man in the slump of his life – not educated enough to escape from his rural village in Nowheresville up North, and has found nothing in his life to stir passion, other than girls. A gorgeous hairdresser, Jane (Nicola Burley) catches his eye, as does her collection of…