It’s been a good year for Peter Mullan. His superb Neds, released earlier this year, was a tough, semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in Glasgow and pulled no punches. Mullan’s character here, Joseph, is built from similar stock. Transplanted to Leeds, Joseph is alone. His wife has died, and he’s just kicked his dog to [...]

I may be going soft in my old age. A documentary about a man learning to be a Santa Claus, and I give it a perfect score? Yes, I gave it a one, and if zero were better I’d give it that. I’ve watched many a cruel movie this year; too many times I’ve watched [...]

Ah, the bungled bank robbery movie. A movie that could have done with a cameo appearance from Eileen Brennan, Flypaper at least adds a slight kink in its comedy presentation, which results in it being slightly fresher than it perhaps could have been. A bank is being robbed, the heist goes wrong, and the perpetrators [...]

Legend has it that there’s a telepathic connection between twins, so when in Julia’s Eyes the titular Julia experiences a choking sensation, she knows something’s wrong with her sister Sara. She’s right — Sara is dead, hanged from a rope in her basement. The signs all point to suicide, at least as far as the [...]

Temptation and fidelity: Two forces battling against each other continuously throughout the early years of a young couple’s marriage. For the first year or two, fidelity rules the roost but as the wedding anniversaries mount, temptation begins to chip away at this solid foundation. When opportunity is added to the equation, one’s character is tested [...]

Having already killed the trucker who saved the girl from his murderous ways, the psychopath tire turned its attentions to the girl herself. After watching her in the shower, the tire checks into a motel room, watches keep-fit programs on TV, and takes a shower, only to be discovered by a maid, who he promptly [...]

Ah, New York, the place where thinking people cannot perform any basic function unless they talk about it first. I wonder: Did Woody Allen create this genre, or did he just reflect everyday happenings of his beloved Big Apple? Whatever, his legacy lives on here in this ensemble comedy that tells of the lives and [...]

Based on her autobiography, Desert Flower tells the story of fashion model Waris Dirie from her Somalian roots to the cover of Vogue magazine, highlighting the despicable practice of female circumcision that still continues today. This is not an ordinary topic for a biopic; its sinister theme should make the movie unmissable but under inexperienced [...]

“Take care of all my children, don’t let ‘em wander and roam. Take care of all of my children for I don’t know when I’m coming back home” – Tom Waits A film most decidedly split in two, Father of My Children brings us a life story of a family. Its initial focus is on [...]

Thea Barfoed, acclaimed stage actress, is an alcoholic, and a nasty one at that. She’s lost her husband to another woman, and has been denied access to her two children for some time. She can hardly complain; she passed out dead-drunk while they were in her care. Now she’s determined to sober up and get [...]

In the early hours of July 17th, 1942, more than 13,000 Jews were taken from their homes in occupied Paris and detained at the Velodrome d’Hiver. They were held there for a few days before being shipped off to a holding site, and finally to the concentration camps, of which only 25 survived. The military [...]

This is a story of three women, and the differing reactions they have to motherhood. First we have a fifty-year old who gave birth at fourteen and gave the child up for adoption. The child grew up to be a successful, albeit detached, lawyer and one who has no intention of being a mother herself. [...]

Good heavens, and here was I thinking that The Infidel was on dangerous ground. Believe me, it’s got nothing on Four Lions, the new movie from controversial British writer Christopher Morris. This is a comedy concerning four British citizens — three of Pakistani descent, one white — whose ultimate goal is to become suicide bombers. [...]

If we didn’t know it before, we know it now. The opening credits appear, and the first line reads ‘David Lynch Presents a Film by Werner Herzog’. Thinking caps on, folks, ‘cos we’re about to get mighty cerebral. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done tells the story of depressive Brad McCullum, and why [...]

It was never really that cool to like Rush. I heard them first when my older brother, whose musical tastes had only previously included Yes, Medicine Head and Genesis (the Peter Gabriel, flower-head version), brought home a copy of 2112 back in 1978 or so, a couple of years after its release. I saw the [...]

Burt and Verona are thirty-somethings, good friends as well as lovers, and will be parents for the first time three months hence. Verona’s parents are both dead, and Burt’s have announced that they’re leaving the country to live abroad for two years. With no real reason to stay near them in their cold house, Burt [...]

When you’ve worked the farm all your life, morning noon and night, it becomes a part of you. When the house on the farm was where you lived with your now-deceased wife for decades, you become a part of it. Abner Cheetham may be eighty, have a bum hip, a weak heart, and need the [...]

Three sisters: Joy, a flighty hippy chick; Trish, a suburban mother; and Helen, a successful screenwriter. The issue at stake: The ability to forgive and forget. For Joy, the choice is simple. She works with ex-cons, helping them to return to society. She’s even married to an ex-con, a gang member who is trying hard [...]

Nominated for an Oscar, winner of a BAFTA, A Prophet tells the story of young Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rehim), jailed for six years, and the amount of growing up he has to do in that time. With an Arabic name, but French allegiance, Malik is alone once inside. He cannot read or write and [...]

It is 1910, the last year of Count Lev Nikolayevitch (Leo) Tolstoy’s life. He is 82 years old and his writing days are behind him. His work was so popular that he gained followers — nowadays they’d be called fanboys — who were known as Tolstoyans. One of the main tenets of the Tolstoyans was [...]

The Runaways were a peculiar phenomenon. They were less of a band than a product, and the product they sold was teen rebellion. The five-girl band was fronted by sixteen year old Cherie Currie, Joan Jett was on tousled mop and rhythm guitar, Lita Ford played lead, Sandy West was the drummer, and they had [...]

1984, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is sweeping the world, including in a small ramshackle village in New Zealand. There, living with his grandmother, a younger brother and several cousins, we meet Boy. He’s about nine or ten years old, I’d guess. His younger brother, Rocky, is six and thinks he has super-powers. Boy has no [...]

An eight-year old Australian girl and a mid-forties obese Jewish American man with Asperger’s Syndrome. Seems an unlikely pairing, doesn’t it? And yet Mary and Max, a stop-motion animated movie from Australia, matches the two together with no small measure of wit, and presents us with one of the most original films I’ve seen in [...]

Prospect: One small town in one of the southern states, population 1832, where everybody knows everybody else and the ubiquitous ‘Welcome To…’ sign on the town’s border feels more like the doors of a prison cell. Rhett Ryan knows these ties all too well but, as a wannabe country singer, he thinks he sees a [...]

The videotape rolls: “My name is Yusuf Mohammad, my former name is Steven Arthur Younger, and I have planted three nuclear bombs across the country. They will detonate unless my demands are met.” He then points the camera at exhibit A, looking suspiciously like a nuclear bombs with oh, I should say, about 4.5 pounds [...]

Creating a satire of the London art gallery scene would seem to be a rather pointless venture but director Duncan Ward, armed with his DVD collection of Robert Altman movies and aided by a lengthy cast list, brings us the lives and loves of assorted artsy types in his debut picture, Boogie Woogie. The plot, [...]

Boots Mason is a tough guy all right, make no mistake about it. There’s always room in the over-crowded London mob scene for a guy like him, and so it is that we find him doing a spot of debt-collecting at the start of this derivative gangster movie, The Heavy. He’s not long out of [...]

His name is Rizwan Khan and he is not a terrorist. However, he’s a Muslim in a post 9/11 America, and not everyone believes him. He must tell the President in the hope that this simple message will filter down through society. The situation is not helped by the fact that Rizwan suffers from Asperger’s [...]

It’s an interesting concept: Soldiers returning home after the Iraqi war serving what’s left of their enlistment period as messengers for the Army, instructed to tell unsuspecting husbands, wives or other next of kin that their loved ones won’t be returning. I’m pretty sure it’s not official policy, but that’s what happens to Staff Sergeant [...]