Short Reviews

Rigor Mortis

Juno Mak’s directorial debut is a moody revivial of the quintessentially Hong Kong hopping vampire films of the 1980s. Assembling a cast of horror veterans, headed by Chin Siu Ho,… Read More
Live And Let Die

You never need an excuse to rewatch a James Bond film, even a middling entry like Guy Hamilton’s Live And Let Die, but this time I was attentively revisiting the… Read More
The Stone Roses: Made of Stone

British filmaker and self-confessed Stone Roses fan Shane Meadows chronicles the legendary Manchester band’s brief and heated comeback in fine style in this passionate documentary. Meadows takes the time to… Read More
Mr. Go

When her grandfather dies, 15-year-old Wei Wei (Xu Jiao) inherits his circus, particularly their star attraction: a baseball-playing gorilla, Ling Ling. Unfortunately, she also inherits his huge gambling debts and… Read More
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

I was unfamiliar with the source material of this Twilight-esque tale of angels and demons walking the Earth amongst us. The film was fairly resoundingly dismissed upon released, both by… Read More
The Fog

Right in the middle of his golden period, John Carpenter gave us this entertaining ghost story about a small coastal town founded atop a leper colony that is enveloped in… Read More
White House Down

Roland Emmerich’s take on the “Die Hard in the White House” action set-up that was visited earlier this year in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, is a far bigger, louder… Read More
The Conjuring

James Wan’s most interesting and artistically successful film since the original Saw goes back to basics, delivering an incredibly effective haunted house tale, with some added ghost hunter fun thrown… Read More
Seconds

Rock Hudson stars as Tony Wilson, the newly rejuvenated version of tired businessman Arthur Hamilton, who enlisted the services of a secret organisation to give him a “second chance” at… Read More
The Look of Love

Michael Winterbottom’s rose-tinted biopic of Paul Raymond, purveyor of pornography and sleaze in London’s SoHo, creates a wonderfully authentic sense of time and place, and boasts a pair of knockout… Read More
Safety Last!

An undisputed classic of American Silent Cinema and one of the very best examples of physical comedy committed to screen, Safety Last! remains the best-known film of Harold Lloyd, despite… Read More
Kick-Ass 2

Huge disappointment after the surprisingly witty original. Here, the film seems completely disinterested in its characters, so ripe with nuance and subversion, and is instead content simply to gross out… Read More
Mud

Excellent folloy up to Take Shelter from director Jeff Nichols, starring Matthew McConaughey as a fugitive hiding out in the bayous of Arkansas, who is discovered by two young lads,… Read More
Pickpocket

There are some epic displays of sleight of hand in Robert Bresson’s tale of crime through desperation, but it’s not much of a thrill ride. Many great filmmakers of crime… Read More
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang’s excellent sequel to his silent epic Dr. Mabuse The Gambler (which I’ve not yet seen) sees the eponymous master criminal incarcerated in a mental asylum, where he perpetually… Read More
Olympus Has Fallen

Some grumbled about Antoine Fuqua’s straight-faced approach to this “Die Hard in The White House” wannabe, but I mostly enjoyed the way it got back to basics, without the need… Read More
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

I never got around to seeing the first film in the series that looked like little more than an American knock-off of Harry Potter, albeit one embroiled in the world… Read More
The Tarnished Angels

My first daliance with Douglas Sirk saw me inadvertently stumble onto a classic. Rock Hudson plays an ambitious journalist, who bumbles into the world of daredevil stunt pilots and gatecrashes… Read More