Afternoon Delight (2013)

From writer/director Jill Soloway, Afternoon Delight is a comedy drama starring Kathryn Hahn, Juno Temple and Josh Radnor about a married stay at home mother who becomes dissatisfied with her mundane life and, without much thought and in an attempt to regain some social purpose, takes on a young stripper as a nanny with aspirations…

Labor Day (2013)

Whilst Kevin Hart has taken up most of my cinema viewing over the past few weeks with Ride Along and About Last Night, it appears as though Kate Winslet is following suit with a double bill of releases in late March and early April. The first of these releases is Labor Day, an adaptation of…

20 Feet From Stardom (2013)

20 Feet From Stardom surprised a lot of people back in the beginning of March when it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature over the much revered and much touted The Act Of Killing. The film’s tagline is “meet the unsung heroes behind the greatest music of our time”, and the audience are…

Mini Reviews #9

Philomena (2013) Director: Stephen Frears Starring: Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Anna Maxwell Martin A well crafted and brilliantly paced British drama about the real life search of an Irish pensioner to find the son she was forced to give away in the 1950s. Philomena is both touching and devastating in the all of the right places,…

Nymphomaniac, Vols. I & II (2013)

Nymphomaniac (or NYMPH( )MANIAC, as it has been styled) is a four hour long erotic drama from writer and director Lars Von Trier that retrospectively details the life of Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a self professed sex addict. Presumably for the sake of cinema scheduling and the sanity of an audience, the film has followed in…

About Last Night (2014)

The no mans land of post Oscar season film releases continues to roll along, and it appears that I can only watch films starring Kevin Hart this month. Following the utterly mediocre experience that was Ride Along, the pint sized actor comedian is back on my big screen in About Last Night, a remake of…

Top Ten: School Movies

For me, a ‘school movie’ is not a movie that has to be specifically about the academic lives of its characters, but rather a film whose central action is undertaken in the setting of the classrooms and hallways of educational institutions. Given the normal age range of the characters within these narratives, the themes of…

300: Rise Of An Empire (2014)

It was against my better judgement way back in 2006 that I thoroughly, and unexpectedly, enjoyed Zack Snyder’s 300, a gloriously ludicrous visual feast show casing both sides of the skin spectrum, with oiled, muscular bodies aplenty juxtaposing an ever increasing pile of ruined bodies and severed limbs. The film as a whole was unremarkable…

Ride Along (2014)

It feels like a million years ago that I watched John Singleton’s 1991 crime drama classic Boyz N The Hood. At the time of the film’s release, rapper Ice Cube was a member of N.W.A, arguably the greatest hip-hop group of all time, and gave a performance equal to any of the picture’s more established…

Non-Stop (2014)

Here we go again. Hard man Liam Neeson doing hard man shouty things. The difference? This time his shouting and punching is confined to the cabins of an aeroplane. Neeson stars as Bill Marks, a grizzly, personally troubled U.S. federal air marshal who finds himself in the midst of a highly dangerous game of cat…