Reviews

From John Carney, the writer and director of Once, comes Begin Again – a spiritual follow up to the acclaimed (and Oscar winning) 2006 romantic musical drama. Like his former work, Begin Again focuses on music as something that can represent a moment in your life. In Once, it was about bringing two people together and creating…

A Hitchcockian thriller in the country, Tom At The Farm is a grim exploration of homophobia, secrecy and family sustainability. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan (I Killed  My Mother, Heartbeats), the film is based on the play of the same name by Michel Marc Bouchard. Tom – played by Dolan – is a young…

Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer) are very much in love, living in a poky apartment in Barcelona and planning to have a baby when Alex is offered an un-missable career opportunity. In Los Angeles. Living 10,000 kilometres apart, they make the best use of modern technology to stay in touch – Skype features…

And So It Goes won’t win any points for its name. Nor will it win any prizes for originality. But this rom-com does have a bewildering amount of talent coming together to make a film that’s not great, just nice. This means it is fun and pleasant enough to watch, but it won’t change your…

While any female with internet connection and a love of fashion and style are intimately familiar with street fashion photographer Scott Schuman from The Sartorialist, or fashion blogging powerhouse duo Tash Sefton and Elle Ferguson from They All Hate Us, not many are aware of Ari Seth Cohen’s work on fashion blog Advanced Style. Why?…

Love comes in many forms. It can exist as the experience of first love between a young couple, the frustrating protective love a parent has for their child or the love a couple who have been together for nearly 40 years share. In Love is Strange, we see all three, and director Ira Sachs has…

The Good Life (La Belle Vie) is a French drama film based on a true story. It’s a delicate, coming of age tale and portrait of paternal love set in the freewheeling countryside. It asks some big questions about love and freedom. But while it is beautiful, it fails to fill in some of the…

Admit it, you weren’t too confident a buddy cop, action flick could mesh with a supernatural horror film and actually work, at all. I thought the exact same thing. As such, I went into Deliver Us From Evil with unfairly low expectations and walked away feeling defeated; deflated in my ability to judge a film…

Marvel Studios and the Disney team had a huge amount of reputation riding on this film after setting the bar ridiculously high with their ensemble action superhero fest that was The Avengers. With a bunch of characters who are mostly unknowns unless you’re a comic fan, this film would need to pull out some wicked…

We Are The Best! (Vi är bäst!) is a loaded title but this Swedish film is all about challenging your expectations. The movie was written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, who was adapting the graphic novel that his wife, Coco, had penned about her fictionalised teenage years. The result is a feel good, coming-of-age story…

One of the entries in MIFF’s Big Scene – Small Screen program, Doll & Em is an unassuming portrait of a friendship that succeeds with a delightful mix of undeniable heart and unobtrusive style. Doll (Dolly Wells) and Em (Emily Mortimer) have been best friends since childhood. When Doll unceremoniously breaks up with her boyfriend,…

One of the great things about Danny Boyle’s work is that it’s so damned colourful. Even when times are tough and the characters are going through hell, there’s always technicolour and light and thumping music. Ok, maybe not in 28 Days Later, but in the majority of his movies. It helps us digest some of the bleaker…

From the man that brought you La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element comes yet another stylised badass individual out to settle some scores whilst simultaneously attempting to advance humankind through a very thinly veiled pseudo-science and psychology subplot. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is our hapless damsel unwittingly roped into being a drug…

A Most Wanted Man is an espionage thriller about terrorists. But despite this genre, the film contains no explosions, gun battles or high-tech special effects. Instead, it has more in common with The Ides Of March, in that it is a tense and dramatic labyrinth of power plays where rivals with competing agendas use political…

It’s a simple question with no straight-forward answer, “What would you do?” if it really was your last day on the earth, if you knew it was all going to end, how would you spend your final waking moments? These Final Hours examines the dystopian world that James (Nathan Phillips) must navigate as the remaining…

High-concept films are so called because they have a premise that can be easily summed up (and sold) in one sentence or so, and many of the most successful comedies of recent years fall under that banner. A group of friends must retrace their drunken night in order to find their missing friend. A laidback…

There is fewer dialogue and exposition needed in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the long awaited sequel to 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the film benefits greatly from it. While Rise was an exciting movie itself, with one of the best reboots of an old franchise in years, Dawn…

A dark thread is strung throughout Devils Knot, the latest feature from Egoyan in which the unnerving act of a real-life case of child murder looms from beginning to end, with the sense of dread carried out well enough for the film to stick with you long after the credits. Unfortunately, awkward pacing speeds through…

Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad (Tôkyô tawâ: Okan to boku to, tokidoki, oton) will warm your heart and tug at your heartstrings. The winner of the best film award at the Japanese Academy Awards as well as winning a host of others, is a slow-burning and detailed family drama. It’s also the…

Here it is: the final installment in the Easy Money franchise: Life Deluxe. Old favourites are back, old scores need to be settled, and new players find themselves drawn into Sweden’s dark criminal underbelly. JW (Joel Kinnaman) is on the run after his successful robbery at the conclusion of Hard to Kill, and has made…

Thankfully, Disney’s latest installment in the animated Tinker Bell series isn’t lacking the accessible and progressive social commentary like it used to, with Tinker Bell & The Pirate Fairy standing as one very well-crafted, cheeky, and inspired work of art aimed at imbuing young girls with something that has a bit more depth than your…

2010 film Easy Money was a runaway hit in Sweden (so much so that a US remake with Zac Efron is in the works). The film, based on the novel of the same name by Jens Lapidus, centred on Stockholm’s gangland wars, with multiple stories of the descent into darkness culminating in one fatal, climactic…

The cautionary tale of never taking anything for granted has been featured on film many many times before, but in this feature documentary film, When I Walk, filmmaker Jason DaSilva chronicles his life with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), from the moment his legs failed on him to the present day. And it’s anything but your typical…

Spooks and Spirits­ is the story of thirty-somethings Ingi (Gísli Örn Garðarsson) and Anna (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir), a happy couple on the verge of starting the next big chapter of their lives together. Anna’s father, Ófeigur (Þórhallur Sigurðsson) is recently deceased and the couple plans to sell his house in favour of somewhere more family-oriented. But when Ófeigur makes an…

I’ve not watched a huge amount of Swedish cinema in my life, but the few films that I have watched have the same stylistic feature that has led me to believe something about Swedish dramas: that they are characterised by a distinct visual and narrative style based in honesty and stark realism. This realism is…

The movie version of the musical of the same name, Jersey Boys, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, and director Clint Eastwood does a solid job and even manages to retain a little bit of that musical flair but it’s not altogether brilliant, nor is it terrible. We’re given the fairly routine storyline…

Performing arts has always been – and will always be – fertile ground for documentary filmmaking. Clashing egos and high stakes in the pursuit of a craft is always going to be fun for a camera to follow, and we’ve seen it work multiple times over in movies like Every Little Step, Mad Hot Ballroom,…

Heart Of A Lion (Leijonasydän) is a Finnish drama that asks the question, “Should you be ruled your head or by your heart?” It’s an age-old conflict and yet, this film manages to deal with this along with two sensitive and timely topics (racism and nationalism). Directed by Dome Karukoski, Heart Of A Lion is…

There is always this uncomfortable inner-conflict when I finish watching a Happy Madison production (otherwise known as ‘another Adam Sandler movie’), like I just witnessed something profoundly confusing and I don’t know whether to love it or to hate it. Nowadays, it seems most critics are quick to jump on the ‘hate side’ too often,…

Documentary Keep On Keepin’ On is rather naive in the way it was made. Director Alan Hicks and his cinematographer Adam Hart had never really worked on any similar projects before, so they just kept on shooting until they could piece together a film. It took five years for them to make Keep On Keepin’…