Based on Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind, the title of this adaptation suggests its immediate desire for respectability.
After all Mr. Holmes was part financed by BBC Films and stars no less august a figure than Sir Ian McKellen.…
Author: robertmwallis
Graduate of Royal Holloway and the London Film School. Founder of Of All The Film Sites; formerly Of All The Film Blogs. Formerly Film & TV Editor of The Metropolist and Official Sidekick at A Place to Hang Your Cape. Co-host of The Movie RobCast podcast (formerly Electric Shadows) and member of the Online Film Critics Society.
Cooties is a indie zombie flick that won’t give you the lurgy
There are many opportunities for dread offered by the zombie genre. The shambling, increasingly putrefying undead. The threat of losing one’s own humanity. Cooties introduces in a new one: chickens.
A new horror comedy from first-time directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, Cooties the gruesome passage from battery farming to school meal via flies, maggots, and pink sludge.…
Crimson Peak: the height of Gothic thrills and chills?
With Crimson Peak, beloved horror director Guillermo Del Toro sets about creating another period ghost story.
While his previous work of course includes The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which are set in and around the Spanish Civil War, this entry on his filmography takes its cues more from classic Gothic melodrama.…
Office is a lavish but dull workplace musical
They’re the places that, for better or worse, occupy (or rather we occupy for) most of our waking hours.
It’s perhaps surprising then that the common-or-garden workplace doesn’t feature more prominently in cinema. Sure, there’s the bureaucracy-bound comedy of Office Space, the coked-up sexcapades of Wolf of Wall Street, or the Kafkaesque delirium of Brazil — but they’re rarely characterised as productive working environments.…
Desierto is an arid slice of indie thriller
When you come from a Hollywood directing dynasty how do you established yourself as an independent filmmaker in your own right?
Not having a critic mention it in the first line of their review probably helps, but it’s a point that bears reflecting on.…
Carol is a transcendent plea for kindness and beauty
With sapphic romantic drama Carol, Todd Haynes confirms himself as a master of forbidden love.
In 2002’s Far From Heaven, stylized as a Sirkian ‘50s melodrama, he doubled down on issues of race and sexuality. Here, however, it all comes down to a single relationship between black-bobbed shop-girl Therese (Rooney Mara) and reluctant socialite Carol (Cate Blanchett), whose eyes meet across a crowded store one busy December morning.…
The Wave (2015) starts as a tsunami and turns into a washout
You may remember Dennis Gansel’s The Wave (Die Welle), a fictionalised take on The Third Wave, which saw a group of high school students established their own fascist dictatorship as part of a social experiment.
A complex study of the evil that can occur as a result of social pressure and groupthink, it missed out on Germany’s 2008 submission for Best Foreign Language to The Baader Meinhof Complex.…
Is this the (Brothers) Quay to Nolan’s whole oeuvre?
As arguably the foremost director of high-brow cinematic entertainment on the planet, it seems reasonable that Christopher Nolan might want to take a breather between blockbusters.
After the $165 million universe-spanning epic that was Interstellar you can’t get much more palette cleanser-y than an eight-minute behind-the-scenes of the magical junk shop-workshop of a pair of stop-motion animators.…
Love & Peace is a charmingly inconsistent monstrosity
You never know quite what you’re going to get with Sion Sono.
The cult Japanese director’s most recent film, Shinjuku Swan, was a live-action adaptation of a manga about a young talent scout’s forays into the red light district; the one before, Tokyo Tribe, a futuristic gang warfare film featuring almost literal “rap battles”.…
11 Minutes has too many lines and too few hooks
The fundamental question any film must ask itself is, “Why tell this story?”
In the case of 11 Minutes, the twenty-fifth film from Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the problem is exacerbated: why tell these stories, any of them?
Why tell the story of ambivalent blonde actress (Paulina Chapko), the intense, insinuating casting agent (Richard Dormer) looking to bed her, or her wounded husband (Wojciech Mecwaldowski), who spends the film stalking stylized hotel corridors in search of her?…