Film Review: The World's End (2013)

They say that school days are the best days of your life. It's a lovely thought, especially since it conjures up images of youthful exuberance untainted by the responsibilities of adulthood, but also an insidious one. After all, for school days to be the best days of your life, everything afterwards has to be all downhill. All the excitement, joy and promise has to fizzle out into nothing, leaving only fond memories of a future that never came to pass. Gary King (Simon Pegg) not only sees school as the peak of his life, but one night in particular. Back in June of 1990, he and his friends Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman) and Pete (Eddie Marsan) embarked on an epic pub crawl through their home town of Newton Haven. They had intended to drink in all twelve drinking establishment along the fabled Golden Mile, but ultimately they failed. Regardless, it was the best night of Gary's life, and everything since then has been a sad, sorry decline.

Film Review: Ill Manors (2012)

Covering a week in the lives of the denizens of a London estate, the debut feature from Ben Drew (better known as Plan B) initially seems to be a fairly standard entry into the gritty, British crime drama sub-genre. Its collection of small time criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes and wayward youth are pretty standard archetypes, whilst its multiple storylines, taken separarely, are overly familiar.

Film Review: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Ever since he revitalised the franchise with Batman Begins in 2005, Christopher Nolan has used the character of Batman/Bruce Wayne and the setting of Gotham City as a prism through which to view the fears and tensions of contemporary America. This was especially explicit in the second film, The Dark Knight, which posited Heath Ledger's Joker as a chaotic, unstoppable force of destruction with nothing to lose. In short, he was a nervous and unhinged personification of the spectre of terrorism, complete with recorded messages of violence, political assassinations, and destruction on a massive scale.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 3 - Britain

On this episode of Shot/Reverse Shot, Joe Gastineau and I sit down to talk about British cinema, us both being Brits what what. Taking the statement made by David Cameron that British cinema needs to focus on more commercially viable works in order to better compete with Hollywood, we examine the practicalities of the British film industry, the many great and varied British films that came out last year, and talk about the history and philosophy of what it means to make a British film. Along the way, we also manage to talk about how Richard Curtis murdered Jim Henson (which, for legal reasons, I would like to point out is not a real thing) and Barry Norman's Pickled Onions (which totally are a real fucking thing.)

You can listen to the episode using the player below, or alternatively you can download it from iTunes by searching for SRS Podcast. You could even subscribe, if you want to be one of the cool kids.

Film Review: Wuthering Heights (2011)

It’s hard to watch Andrea Arnold’s version of Emily Brontë’s novel about the destructive, all-consuming power of love without comparing it to Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which was released mere months earlier. This is, to an extent, superficial, since the two might not have been compared if they weren’t released within the same twelve month period. There have been plenty of adaptations of both works, why compare these two merely because they are the most recent?

Film Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film that, on a purely technical level, is hard to fault. It's beautifully shot by Tomas Alfredson, who previously directed the superb Let The Right One In, well acted by a rogue's gallery of great British acting talent and it has a wonderful sense of time and place to it. Alfredson and his crew capture a decaying Britain that is slowly suffocating under the weight of the Cold War and its own sense of increasing obsolescence. Much like the John le Carré novel upon which it is based, the film really conveys a sense that the spies and intelligence agents that populate it have seen better days and are now going through the motions, no longer certain that the war they are fighting is really worth a damn anymore. It's a Cold War thriller that is appropriately chilly.

Film Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

I suppose it's prudent to begin this review by admitting that I haven't read Lionel Shriver's incredibly popular 2003 novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, so if you are hoping for an account of how the film adaptation works as a transition to the big screen, then I can't help you. I came to the material completely fresh and with no pre-conceptions, so I can only write about how I felt about the film itself. (Even what I had heard of the book was evenly balanced, since two people whose opinions I respect had told me that it was either brilliant or irredeemably shit. Balance!)

DVD Review: Quatermass and The Pit (1967)

One of the main problems with watching old, “classic” films is that most of them have, for one reason or another, dated. Most of the time these things can be overlooked by placing the work in its original context and accepting that ideas, attitudes and styles change over time, but there are some genres which date worse than others. The chief amongst these are science fiction and horror, since effects and ideas that were once fantastical and scary can look farcical and silly viewed years or decades later.

Film Review: Tyrannosaur (2011)

Going by the opening scene of Tyrannosaur, the debut directorial feature of actor Paddy Considine (Dead Man's Shoes, Hot Fuzz, The Bourne Ultimatum), in which its main character beats his beloved dog to death, it would be all too easy to dismiss it as yet another example of miserablist kitchen sink drama that British cinema so often produces. After Joseph (Peter Mullan) gets drunk and angry, he kicks his dog and breaks his ribs. It's devastating for Joseph, and after an outburst in a pub (one of many manifestations of his barely suppressed rage that, it is implied, has landed him in trouble before) he runs into a charity shop run by Hannah (Olivia Colman) and begins to cry when she offers to pray for him.

Film Review: Submarine (2010)

I discovered a book on teenage paranoia as I was searching my mother's drawers...

Based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, Submarine tells the story of a young man named Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a young pseudo-intellectual who believes himself to be a great literary mind in the making. It's the latest in a long line of cinematic bildungsroman that can be traced back to The 400 Blows, with detours through The Graduate and Rushmore. Like the characters in those films, Oliver is a self-involved young man who thinks that everything happening in his life is a matter of the utmost importance. In his voiceover narration he even goes so far as to say that he imagines his life is a film in which he is the star, and therefore the story of his relationship with Jordana (Yasmin Paige) is one of the great romances of all time.

Film Review: Neds (2010)

John McGill (Connor McCarron) is a bright young thing faced with a not particularly bright future. Growing up in Glasgow in the late '70s, he seems destined to follow his father (writer and director Peter Mullan) in to a menial job. Despite his furious intelligence, his prospects seem limited and unfulfilling. Faced with no viable options, he follows in the footsteps of his older brother Benny and becomes part of one of the gangs of feral youths that roam the streets, inflicting increasingly vicious acts of violence on each other. John becomes a Non-Educated Delinquent.

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold's second feature is, without a doubt, one of the most uncomfortable films I've ever seen. That's not to say that it is a 'tough' film or a 'difficult' film, in the way of something like Irreversible, but rather that it is so close and claustrophobic, so intensely intimate that I found myself feeling very, very uneasy throughout.