Foreign

Review: Bruno

Let's get this out of the way early ' I didn't care too much for Bruno when he appeared on Da Ali G Show. He was nothing more than just a bit of filler between the funnier skits of Ali G and Borat. It may have been his hair, his general demeanour or just my total lack of interest in the industry he's mocking, but Sacha Baron Coh...

Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

As movie bylines go, 'A Film By Woody Allen' doesn't exactly scream sex. Sure, the New York neurotic has made it his life's work to dissect and devolve the physical act of love, but usually with all the romanticism of a side-burned sex-education video presenter, quizzically pointing out its bemusing affect on those who lust afte...

Review: [REC]

Given the huge success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, it's strange that's it's taken almost ten years for horror filmmakers to jump on the shaky-cam bandwagon. In January this year we had the awesome Cloverfield, a monster movie documented on camcorder by various Abercrombie & Fitch models, and in March we've got Diary Of T...

Review: Apocalypto

If the hype for Apocalypto seemed to build for an extended period of time (indeed, much longer than normal) then it's probably due to the fact that it did. Missing its proposed release date of August 2006 by several months due to extended periods of rain in Mexico where it was filmed (not to mention an infamous drunken episode ...

Review: Them (Ils)

I'm ashamed to say that I'm not really on top of my world cinema; although I'm aware there are nations outside of the UK and the US that do make films, I'm hardly an expert on movies from non-English speaking nations. Take the Romanian film industry, for example: I assumed they were still making movies with potato prints and fi...

Review: District 13

Luc Besson has been a busy boy recently - although he's barely been sat in the director's chair for the last decade, he's proven to be a profilic writer and producer, with over 30 credits to his name over the last two years. Completed in 2004, clips of District 13 began appearing on the internet a while back and generated a fai...

Review: House Of Flying Daggers

Chavs. There are chavs everywhere. The cinema used to be the last bastion of the adult, untouched by the burberry legions, I'm sure it did. Didn't it? Hordes of sportswear-clad teenagers swarm around the lobby, chattering, giggling and making vaguely threatening gestures to any poor soul who happens to enter their theatre of...

Overrated Movies #1: Ring

Just because it's Japanese, doesn't mean it's scary. Repeat this mantra to yourself over and over again for the 90 or so minutes you're watching Hideo Nakata's 'psychological horror' and you'll start to realise that behind all the fawning press quotes and lofty claims of a 'new breed of terror' (from people like professional sp...