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In Bruges / 24 July

The hitmen are chatty and sympathetic, the characters that they encounter along the way are quirky and criminal, and there is (potentially irritating trope alert) a film within the film. But erstwhile playwright Martin McDonagh’s feature film debut as writer-director is far less precious – and more pensive – than one might expect. It takes its time to build a sense of dread that by the end is as thick as the fog that engulfs Bruges, and doesn’t entirely dissipate when the story ends.

Review by Victoria Large | Comment

Operation Filmmaker / 22 July

Maybe Operation Filmmaker is a kind of gonzo version of the documentary which proposes to reveal subtleties that can be provoked in no other way but by making the perceiver – the filmmaker – into a subject too, and then drawing out further the relationship between the conventional subject and the narrator (now made flesh). Despite, and because of, its ethical and perceptual problems, Davenport’s work is successful in eliciting thought about the nature of image and reality—and thus by extension, about the nature of documentaries and the folly of the Iraq war itself.

Review by Simon Augustine | Comment

The Party and the Guests / 19 July

The message of the film, its allegory of the Czechoslovak state’s exercise of repressive power over its citizens, is transparent—although it should be stressed, in the film’s favour, that this is all done with a lot of grace, lightness of touch, and wit. But the film’s eventual banning surely can’t have come as a surprise to the filmmakers, even if no explicit correlation is made between the characters of the film and political figures of the day and you can apply its allegory to other situations.

Review by Ian Johnston | Comment

Phase IV / 17 July

The legendary king of credit designs abandons any manmade explanation for the supernatural antagonists – toxic waste, genetic mutations, etc. – and instead inverts the basic premises of his predecessors: where the ants of Them! were seen as antagonists in post-war America – the America of housewives and suburbs, of liking Ike and TV dinners, but also the society that, incidentally, created them – the ants of Phase IV are depicted as the stable and superior society, with human beings acting as the dangerous outsiders.

Review by Adam Balz | Comment

The Crow / 16 July

The plot is hackneyed and predictable. There is almost nothing to leaven the relentless seriousness, and the very few light moments fail at comedy. It includes gang members or hoodlums engaging in celebratory violence for no discernable reason, and drug use as a shorthand for glamorous soullessness. While Brandon Lee had a lot going for him as far as celebrity potential, his acting doesn’t achieve a lot of depth (not that a lot is asked for). But the substance of the film is immaterial. The Crow remains, more than anything, the quintessential Goth Movie.

Review by Katherine Follett | Comments (1)

The Mosquito Coast / 09 July

Peter Weir’s 1986 film The Mosquito Coast, from a novel by Paul Theroux, is a movie of a particularly peculiar breed: the kind that seems more suited to being talked about than watched. Go ahead and discuss it in the context of Weir’s other work, or screenwriter Paul Shrader’s, or star Harrison Ford’s. Compare it to the novel on which it’s based, or to Fitzcarraldo and Swiss Family Robinson and Heart of Darkness. It’s a movie that’s eager to engage the head, but its ideas end up in a tangle, and worse, the film too often misses the heart.

Review by Victoria Large | Comment

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