The James Marsh film review archive

Short Reviews

  • Hatchet for the Honeymoon

    Terrible low-rent Psycho knock-off from Mario Bava featuring an array of beautiful brides being bumped off by poor, troubled Stephen Forsyth. Ridiculous fashions, pitiful acting and a lethargic narrative that… Read More

  • La Poison

    Delightfully pitch-black comedy from French satirist Sacha Guitry, who is something of a new discovery for me. Michel Simon plays the woefully unhappy Broconnier who plots to murder his wife… Read More

  • This is 40

    The latest comedy from Judd Apatow is a “sort-of” sequel to Knocked Up, discarding Seth Rogen and Kathering Heigl’s characters in favour of supporting couple, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie… Read More

  • The Searchers

    Some of you may remember that I watched this as recently as January, in preparation for a feature I was writing for the Hong Kong Film Archive. Well, now the… Read More

  • Les Cousins

    Claude Chabrol immediately followed up his debut, Le beau Serge, with this altogether more cynical and scathing depiction of city life in the late 1950s. Again he uses lead actors… Read More

  • The Way We Dance

    Very much cut from the same cloth as the Step Up series, Adam Wong’s Hong Kong dance comedy sees plucky young wannabe Fleur (Cherry Ngan in what will surely prove… Read More

  • Lesson of the Evil

    Prolific Japanese director Miike Takashi returns to his exploitation roots with this darkly comic story of a murderous high school teacher, who takes dead aim at his own students. Read More

  • Le beau Serge

    Claude Chabrol launches the Nouvelle Vague with this sombre tale of a young man from the city returning to the village where he grew up and attempting to rebuild his… Read More

  • The Man Who Knew Too Much

    I had seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 American remake before, starring James Stewart and Doris Day, but this was my first time seeing his original British production. Leslie Banks and Edna… Read More

  • Jurassic Park

    What better way to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of one of the best summer blockbusters of…umm…the last 20 years, than by re-releasing it on the big screen for a whole… Read More

  • Jackie Brown

    Jackie Brown

    I recently discovered that my girlfriend hadn’t seen any Quentin Tarantino films (with the exception of Pulp Fiction, which I’m pretty sure everyone of our generation has seen) and so… Read More

  • Bad Film

    Ambition conquers aesthetics in Sono Sion’s epic Tokyo Gagaga experiment from 1995, which is only now seeing the light of day. 160mins of gang fights & gay love shot of… Read More

  • Nobody’s Child

    Newly restored by the HK Film Archive, this 1960 adaptation of Hector Malot’s novel Without Family, stars a young Josephine Siao Fong Fong as a young girl in search of… Read More

  • The Incredibles

    It’s not just the superhero angle that makes Brad Bird’s Oscar-winning Pixar hit of 2004 so eminently re-watchable, it’s just a damn well written and animated film. From the character… Read More

  • The Act of Killing

    Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling, surreal and at times very funny documentary tracks down some of Indonesia’s most notorious death squad leaders, who are only too happy to recount and even act… Read More

  • Heaven’s Gate

    Another of the grand restored classics to play at this year’s HKIFF was the fully restored 216-minute version of Michael Cimino’s calamitous Western. This was not the first time I… Read More

  • Blancanieves

    Director Pablo Berger re-locates the Brothers Grimm classic Snow White in the world of Spanish bullfighters, while also harking back to Silent Cinema. Read More

  • Something In The Air

    The latest from Olivier Assayas follows a group of teenage activists immediately after the famous May 1968 riots in Paris, as they must contend with politics, school, friendship, romance and… Read More