The Circle (Dayereh, Iran-Italy-Switz, 2000) and Offside (Iran, 2006)

Jafar Panahi was fortunate, I think, to be on the jury of this year’s Cannes film festival as it made his incarceration in Iran high profile and newsworthy so probably led to his release. The fact he was also on hunger strike accentuated the situation. His ‘crime’ was, reportedly, planning to make a film about [...]

Waitress (US, 2007)

There’s nothing particularly brilliant in this mildly comic, mildly romantic film but it’s worth watching and remarking upon Adrienne Shelley (above left) as she also wrote and directed. All power to this female perspective on romance and while it’s normal to see males presented as hapless in romcoms, there’s an underlying edge here that suggests [...]

[REC] (Spain, 2007)

While there might be nothing original about this zombie movie – the girl above originates from Night of the Living Dead (1968) – there’s plenty of thrills to be derived from the ‘it’s all being recorded as it happens’; also seen in The Blair Witch Project (1998), Day of the Dead (also 2007) and predating [...]

Four Lions (UK, 2010)

In the current issue of Sight and Sound Chris Morris explains: ‘A bomb goes off. We tear about like headless chickens. Our dread infests the fabric. We change our laws. We restrict our freedoms. We lash out at strangers. Brilliant. Of course we long to laugh at our fears, but we don’t know how. Where’s [...]

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (US, 2006)

This could have been good; this could have been very good. Mocking male sexual anxiety is always good and letting the girls (women?) be on top; that’s good. Female super heroes: excellent. What’s not to like? It’s funny too: having a shark thrown at you by an ex-lover, brilliant! Then it dawned on me that [...]

My Sassy Girl (Yeopgijeogin geunyeo, S.Korea, 2001, and US, 2008)

Tamar Jeffers McDonald (Romantic Comedy, Wallflower, 2007) suggests that, in the screwball comedy, affection is expressed through aggression and that the protagonist is often female; an anarchic force that disrupts the stuffy male. Katharine Hepburn is the archetype – so brilliant is she that that word is correct – in the classic Bringing Up Baby [...]

Drag Me to Hell (US, 2009)

Sam Raimi goes back to his Evil Dead (1981, 1987) roots with this film that owes as much to Looney Tunes as it does to the Gothic. I would have preferred the banks to have been the evil Other, rather than eastern European gypsies, however the loan officer protagonist is a sympathetic character as she [...]

Timecrimes (Los cronocrímenes, Spain, 2007)

This is a nicely constructed low tech science fiction time travel story that entwines itself with horror and a horrific moral dilemma. For those familiar with time travel paradox stories, Timecrimes often seems to be treading well trodden water but then twists the narrative in interesting ways. No spoilers here but I do wonder if [...]

General Election

New Labour were desperately disappointing after blowing a chance, in 1997, to challenge the hegemony of free market capitalism. In a sense the opposition parties’ charge that the government is to blame for the recession is true as they didn’t regulate the financial markets as they should have done. However, the charge is really ludicrous [...]