Review

By Jacob Mertens. All writers, at one point or another, have felt the inspired moment when a story moves through them as if they were a conduit. The ability to manifest a living, breathing creature on a piece of paper can feel like an act of magic, and it is […]

By Janine Gericke. 25 events, 2 brothers, 1 champion. Mark and Jay Duplass’ latest film, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon is an enigmatic comedy about two estranged brothers who want to determine once and for all, who the better brother is. How do they do this? By competing in 25 sporting challenges over […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Imagine Seth MacFarlane, late at night, banging the deskspace next to his laptop – the real him, not the smiling, media friendly celebrity we’ve come to know. He’s on deadline to return notes for the script of his feature film, to be his feature directorial debut. In […]

By Janine Gericke. Versailles calls to mind images of opulence, decadence, couture, ostentatious design and, of course, Marie Antoinette. Filmmaker Benoît Jacquot’s film Farewell, My Queen, based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, shows viewers both sides of this famous palace. The beautiful side, with its lush fabrics, golden hues […]

By Cleaver Patterson. In the rarefied world of cinema, a place frequently lost in a strong belief of its own self-aggrandisement, horror films are generally considered the poor relation. Designed in the main to terrify they are often relegated straight to dvd, unless you’re talking big budget teenage slashfests like the Scream and Final […]

By Jacob Mertens. Sown from the fabric of tragedy, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild ravages through the primeval swamp of the Louisianan bayou with a camera that shakes and slips out of focus. The characters construct shanties from scraps of metal and forgotten rubbish, while their old homes […]

By Matthew Sorrento. When settling down for an evening of trash, theater audiences have a comfortable distance from the content. This decidedly highbrow group – does anyone in the US, save the “most cultured,” support the dying art of drama anymore? – may delight in the bizarre, while they’d flip […]

By Jacob Mertens. “If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely… A legend, Mr. Wayne.” (Henri Ducard, Batman Begins [2005]) If there is one thing Christopher Nolan understands better than […]

By Bryan Nixon. Oliver Stone, the 80’s and 90’s king of aggressively provocative and political American filmmaking (Platoon, Natural Born Killers, JFK), has been directing lackluster films with monstrous ambition over the last decade (Alexander, Wall Street 2, W.). The problem is that he has become regrettably soft in his […]

By Daniel Lindvall. Without the help of a time machine, watching the The Dark Knight Rises on a big screen will probably remain the closest I’ll ever get to what experiencing a Wagnerian propaganda spectacle in 1930’s Berlin must have felt like. It is not just the celebration of the […]