By Janine Gericke. “This is too much madness to explain in one text,” one of five hoodlums turned heroes screams in Joe Cornish’s already-cult sci-fi film Attack the Block. The film won raves at South by Southwest, winning the Audience award, and was quickly picked up by Screen Gems for U.S. […]
Drive (2011)
By Bryan Nixon. “What do you do?” Irene asked. He carefully calculated his response and replied, “I drive.” The protagonist of Drive is a passive aggressive unnamed entity who consistently acts with precision in any given situation. He rarely speaks, and when he does it is usually when he has […]
Beginners (2010)
By Janine Gericke. I have to say that I adore this film. Beginners is Mike Mills’s second feature film, following 2005’s Thumbsucker, which intrigued me through its vulnerable perspective. In Beginners, Mills creates a delicate story based on his own experiences. It’s packed with a spread of incredibly sweet and absolutely heartbreaking moments. At […]
Apollo 18 (2011)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. The poster for this latest cash grab in the ever-lucrative wave of ‘found footage’ horror cinema intrigued me when I saw it in passing at a local theater earlier this year, its tagline stating ‘There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon,’ and underneath […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: French Sundaes
By Deirdre O’Neill. For the next six months as part of its ongoing fundraising effort The Cinema Museum is hosting a season of French films that will, hopefully, provide a snapshot of French cinema over the last 80 years. The programme has been curated by Jon Davies and will screen […]
‘In the Field’
September 14, 2011
‘In the Field’ is our virtual take on a talent campus — programs that many film festivals these days are implementing — with the aim of supporting young scholars and emerging writers. So please join us in welcoming our new authors, and in our efforts to champion these budding artists […]
Contagion (2011)
By Bryan Nixon. It always starts with a cough. Naivety hints at the common cold. Or maybe it’s something worse, such as the flu. Maybe it’s a symptom of a deadly virus that threatens all life on Earth. The latter is the case with Steven Soderbergh’s latest slick and sophisticated […]
FID-Marseille: Festival International du Cinema, 6 July–11 July, 2011
By Philip Cartelli. Near the end of Philippe Grandrieux’s hyperbolic It May Be That Beauty Has Reinforced Our Resolve – Masao Adachi (Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre resolution – Masao Adachi, 2011), screened in the international competition at this year’s FID, director Masao Adachi looks into […]
Beginners (2010)
By Jacob Mertens. In the opening moments of Mike Mills’ Beginners we see a vase of dead flowers against a dirty kitchen window. The camera is tight, shallow focus, not letting the room breathe. The film cuts to Ewan McGregor’s character Oliver wandering through a near empty house. He dumps […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: Silent Clowns
August 30, 2011
By Deirdre O’Neill. Sometimes it’s easy to forget film has a history and that silent cinema is that history. And sometimes it is easy to think of silent cinema as a genre. But as Bryony Dixon silent film archivist at the BFI Southbank has pointed out silent cinema is not […]