123 articles

“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” [Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray ]. Stephen...
Nov 25, 2010 / Eric M. Armstrong
Children are cinema’s simultaneously fetishized commodity and artless liability. You can’t harm them, yet you can have them perpetrate terrible acts of inhumanity. “Ana’s Playground” cuts through the...
Nov 5, 2010 / Eric M. Armstrong
I scarcely remember grinning as much during a film as I did while watching “Let Me In.” Grinning during a horror movie, you ask? Allow me to explain. It was an all-encompassing smile of pleasure,...
Oct 30, 2010 / Vanessa Graniello
Now that the 54 th London Film Festival has drawn to a close, it’s time to look back at all of the feature films that I reviewed. Here is the list, ordered from best to worst. 1) Dhobi Ghat 2) The...
Oct 29, 2010 / Alison Frank
Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right is one of those films that’s fun to watch at the cinema, just for the appreciative reactions of the audience. I’m sure I saw a few eyes being wiped during its...
Oct 28, 2010 / Alison Frank
“Catfish” is one of those films that will have as many interpretations as it has viewers. The middle-aged hipster-loathing intellectual will see it as nothing more than an outlet for the filmmakers...
Oct 25, 2010 / Eric M. Armstrong
Initially, Ayub Khan Din was hesitant to write a sequel to East is East (1999): the film was among the most successful independent British films ever made, and he knew that sequels rarely live up to...
Oct 25, 2010 / Alison Frank
Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather is a nice film that could have been even better. It centres on Doug, a young man who has abandoned his degree in forensics to come home to Portland, Oregon. There, he shares...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
Kiran Rao has made an excellent debut with Dhobi Ghat (aka Mumbai Diaries ), a film which she wrote and directed, and which had its first UK screening at the London Film Festival last night. During...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
Tabloid is a documentary which uses interviews to investigate a case which was a source of lurid fascination to the British public in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Joyce McKinney was an American...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
The first three shots of Anton Corbijn’s The American are enchanting, and prepare the audience for a real treat. The film fades in on a stationary shot of a pristine snowy plain with a Norwegian...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
Given the success of Julian Schnabel’s previous film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), audiences will have high expectations when they go to see Miral , his most recent feature. Like The...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
The Magic Tree ( Magiczne Drzewo , 2009) is not really about a tree: when the film begins, the tree in question has already fallen down during a storm, and has been used to make a number of different...
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
The name might already be familiar to you from news reports during the mid-2000s. Pat Tillman was a young American football player who chose to put his career on hold in order to join the US Army....
Oct 24, 2010 / Alison Frank
“ R etired, E xtremely D angerous” is the secret behind the ambiguous title of the Robert Schwentke-directed adaptation of the popular graphic novel “RED,” created by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner....
Oct 15, 2010 / Eric M. Armstrong


