The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

For many the animation work of Studio Ghibli is the be all and end all of animated cinema. The Japanese studio has long reigned supreme and the announcement that it’s director Hayao Miyazaki was set to retire after his last film, The Wind Rises, was met with universal sadness. However, Miyazaki wasn’t solely responsible for Ghibli’s output and Isa Takahata, who co-founded Ghibli with Miyazaki, is still making films. Which brings us to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya an Academy Award nominee this year, although it did lose out to Big Hero 6.

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31/03/2015 0

Mommy

Whether or not you get on board with Mommy will be very much down to your initial reaction. If you’re not a fan of subtitles, that will be tick number one in the against column, (although I really have to question why that would be an issue) while the fact it is shot in a 1:1 ratio might just be the final nail in any respective coffin. It insures Mommy is never an easy watch, as the almost perfect square gives the whole film a sense of claustrophobia that it is hard to escape.

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27/03/2015 0

The Voices

Horror comedy is a tough genre to pull off. It requires that you to both produce scares and laughs to truly pull it off and for every Evil Dead 2 there is a whole host of shit that we don’t want to remember. Stepping into that difficult arena is The Voices, directed by Marjane Satrapi whose previous film Persepolis, it’s fair to say, is a very different beast from this one.

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25/03/2015 0

X+Y

X+Y sits in an unusual place. On one hand, it’s a sweet look at a young maths prodigy trying to find a place in the world. He goes to the International Mathematical Olympiad, meets a girl and discovers that there is more to the world than numbers. On the other hand, that same prodigy registers on the spectrum and just doesn’t understand how people work. His father died at a young age and his mother struggles to connect with him. His mentor suffers from multiple sclerosis and he discovers that even in the world of the super smart, bullying is still a major issue.

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19/03/2015 0

Chappie

Hello friends, in an attempt to do something a bit different, this post is a video review of the Neil Blomkamp film Chappie. It’s simply an attempt to mix things up a bit and hopefully future videos will be a little bit more ambitious, but I thought I should start small. Let me know if you have any thoughts and enjoy.

17/03/2015 0

Still Alice

Even though the Oscars have come and gone, those of us in the UK are still catching up on the last of this years nominees. The biggest of which comes in the form of Still Alice, which saw Julianne Moore capturing a gong for the first time, despite four previous nominations. It’s a film that has taken on even more symbolic strength, following the death of Richard Glatzer, one of its directors. Having passed away at the age of 63 from motor neurone disease, his final film will probably be his best remembered.

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13/03/2015 0

It Follows

The problem with most horror films, is that they are not actually that scary. Oh sure, they’ll make you jump and even maybe have the easily scared scream, but the second the jump is gone, the fear is gone as well. It’s what a few people have described as cattle prod cinema and quite frankly most of us are bored with it.

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03/03/2015 0

Trash

There’s a lazy habit in the film industry of boiling things down to an elevator pitch and then sticking with that description. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Trash has become widely known as a Brazilian, Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by Stephen Daldry and written by Richard Curtis, the film has star power behind the scenes, but then chose to follow the City of God model by taking its lead actors from the streets of Brazil, rather than the glamour of Hollywood.

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18/02/2015 0

Big Hero 6

Following up a hit like Frozen was never going to be easy for Disney. Their animated wing has hit a run of form with Tangled, Wreck it Ralph and everyone’s favourite snowy adventure, so the choice to adapt an obscure Marvel property for their latest animated film, might have seemed bold. Of course, that was before adapting obscure Marvel properties became all the vogue and in a post Guardians of the Galaxy world, it’s become clear that it doesn’t matter how many people have read it, the Marvel Disney combo sells.

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17/02/2015 1

The Interview

It is fair to say that The Interview has caused a bit of a fuss. However, hacking scandal and threats of violence aside, there is still a film at the centre of all of that and it has finally seen a release in UK cinemas. The second film to come from the combination of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the first being This is the End, The Interview once again sees Rogen teaming up with James Franco to try to deliver comic success.

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13/02/2015 0