Just Another Love Story (Kærlighed på film, Denmark, 2007)

This is a brilliant neo-noir telling the tale of a frustrated dad who wants more adventure in his life and when he gets it… Well, go and watch the film. Ole Bornedal is a director new to me (he did the English-language Nightwatch (1997), but as writer-director of Just Another Love Story he is clearly [...]

Tokyo Sonata (Japan-Netherlands-Hong Kong, 2008)

I found this a frustrating film as, after a fabulous two thirds, it charges off into  absurd narrative developments. As the image above suggests, this is a dysfunctional family headed by a recently fired ’salaryman’. The framing in the home is terrific, using stairs, doorways etc. to divide family members, as in the melodramas of [...]

The Long Day Closes (UK, 1992)

Terence Davies certainly knows how to frame and edit scenes to signify ‘memory’. It’s the elision time, Bud enters a cinema then seconds later of screen time the crowds teem out at teh end of the screening, and expressionist framing, such as the overhead shots in church, that emphasise the subjectivity of what’s being represented. [...]

The Navigators (UK-Germany-Spain, 2001)

This is a wonderful dramatisation of the stupidity of ‘free market’ economics. As British Rail was dismantled, having been starved of investment for years, the private sector moved in with flashy logos and cut price practices. As ‘headline’ unemployment in the UK barrels over 2 million, it is useful to be reminded of the the [...]

28 Weeks Later (UK-Spain, 2007)

This is a genre film teeming with good ideas: it picks up on the theme of a rampaging virus from the original film (now very close to home – er, the whole world – with swine flu) and adds American military and its occupation of a foreign country. Of course, from a UK perspective, that [...]

Looking for Eric (UK-France-Italy-Belguim-Spain, 2009)

There can be few more surreal moments than Eric Cantona blasting out La Marseillaise on a trumpet high up on a block of flats in Manchester to have appeared in a Ken Loach film. Loach is renowned as a realist filmmaker so to dramatise a figment of Eric’s (beautifully played by Steve Evets) imagination with [...]