Erstwhile reserve of Robert Redford and his Park City, Utah chums, the Sundance Film Festival broadens its horizons by landing at the cultural vacuum that is the O2 arena for four heady days at the end of April.
Archive | March, 2012
From the Archives: The Disappeared (2008)
8 Mar
Johnny Kevorkian’s debut feature is an eerie cross-genre thriller-horror that is sadly let down by its muddled final act. The puzzling denouement is a genuine shame, as for the first hour, Kevorkian delivers a gritty and intelligent study of the themes of loss and isolation. Matthew (a hugely impressive Harry Treadaway) returns home having been in psychiatric care following the disappearance of his younger brother Tom, and frictions soon arise between him and his father Jake (Greg Wise) as old wounds resurface and the blame game begins. As Matthew digs up the past after hearing Tom’s ghostly voice on a video tape of a police appeal, his world soon begins to unravel.
Bottle Rocket (1996)
8 Mar
Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers - can you see how incredible this is going to be?
From the Archives: Genova (2008)
6 Mar
Michael Winterbottom has certainly enjoyed an eclectic directorial career. And while his subjects have been as diverse as the Bosnian War in “Welcome to Sarajevo,” the Manchester music scene in “24 Hour Party People” and the plight of Gitmo inmates in “The Road to Guantanamo,” his work has always paid particular attention to the human aspect of the story. Family relationships form the crux of his latest picture, “Genova,” as he delivers an intimate portrait of the dynamics of a family dealing with loss, youthful rebellion, guilt and cultural change.
THE LOWDOWN WEEK 8
5 MarThe post awards season malaise continues unabated this week with the release of two contenders for Worst Film of 2012. The ludicrously monikered McG scores a hatrick of stinkers with This Means War, which follows Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator Salvation into an unenviable pantheon of awfulness. Vying for the turkey of the week prize is Project X, a film that will make you hate teenagers. Elsewhere, Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston once again team up,15 years after starring together in The Object of My Affection, in Wanderlust, Putin’s dirty politics are exposed in Khodorkovsky and Austrian film Michael portrays a discomfiting tale of paedophilia.
From the Archives: Who Killed Nancy? (2009)
5 Mar
The death of Nancy Spungen – the drug addict, part-time prostitute girlfriend of Sex Pistol’s bassist Sid Vicious – will always be a much debated footnote in the history of punk. The assumption (and indeed the conclusion of a much-maligned investigation by the N.Y.P.D.) was that she was murdered by a heroin-addled Sid, who predictably had no recollection of how Spungen ended up stabbed to death in their dilapidated hotel room bathroom. Sid’s untimely death a mere four months later meant a trial never happened and the police closed the case believing Spungen’s murderer to have met his own sort of justice. Predictably, speculation over what really happened in room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea on the night of Oct. 11, 1978 has been rife ever since: Did Sid really murder his girlfriend – was he even physically capable of such an act – or was it the result of a bungled robbery? It is this uncertainty that Sid Vicious biographer Alan G. Parker attempts to unravel with this frustrating examination of the events leading up to Spungen’s murder.
The Last Samurai (2003)
5 Mar
The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.
crash/burn 