Nicholas Cage is a visionary; he strides boundaries.
Few can claim a filmography as eclectic as his: from Rumble Fish to Vampires Kiss, through Con Air and Face/Off, Adaptation and Lord of War, to Ghost Rider, Kick-Ass, and now Joe.…
Tag: drama
The Riot Club is, worryingly, a bit of a blast
An elite club populated by the best and brightest – or at least the richest and most (literally) entitled – of Oxford University; banned from campus and every nearby venue for their wild and destructive behavior; young men groomed for power, who grow up believing that money can buy them anything, including immunity from the law.
…In Order of Disappearance: worth getting lost in the snow for?
Known though they are for their bleak crime dramas, the Nords aren’t particularly renowned for their sense of humor.
It’s only half surprising then that Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance is both very, very bleak and very funny.…
Boyhood is a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a kid
You hear a lot of talk about ambition in film: ambitious scale, ambitious complexity, ambitious effects.
It’s rare though that a story is ambitious simply in its conception, in its commitment to telling a story. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is such a film, a film that could be said to define his whole body of work.…
Locke shows that all you need for a great film is an engine
The shadowy interior of a BMW, the sallow yellow glare of a streetlamp; road markings, overpasses. “You have a call waiting”.
As premises go, Locke’s is rivetingly simple: Ivan Locke, a foreman on a construction site, has had to make a last-minute trip from Birmingham down to London.…
Let’s be Frank: this indie dramedy has an identity crisis
It’s a bit of a contradiction when you walk into a film with no idea of what to expect and walk out somehow disappointed.
This is certainly true in the case of Frank, a quirky little indie dramedy from director Lenny Abrahamson.…
Blue Ruin’s cautionary tale is Death Wish meets the Hatfield-McCoys
Real life isn’t like the movies.
True love is not the inevitable outcome of a tempestuous first meeting and cars don’t blow up just because you put a few bullets in them. It’s this reality that is at the heart of Blue Ruin.…
The Machine can’t quite locate a soul amid the moving parts
As productions, Transcendence and The Machine couldn’t be further apart.
The first is a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp; the second was shot on 1% of that budget with a British TV actor best known as the villain from Die Another Day.…
Noah will have you in floods (of something)
When you think of marketable movie types, you probably think rom-com or superhero movie.
It’s unlikely your mind would go straight to Biblical epic. Cinematic tales of lions, Christians, and Roman arenas went out with Cecil B. DeMille.
Then again, to those long awaiting a resurgence, Darren Aronofsky is certainly a promising choice of director.…
Calvary is a profane, heartbreaking spiritual journey
There are plenty of filmmaking sibling duos out there – the Coen Brothers, the Dardenne brothers, the Wachowskis – but it’s rare for them to work completely independently of each other.
In 2008, playwright Martin McDonagh made his break into film with In Bruges, a dark comedy about two hitmen hiding out in the Medieval Flemish city; three years later, his brother John Michael McDonagh made his film debut in the form of The Guard, about a hedonistic but thoughtful Connemara constable.…