Author: The Reviews Hub - Film

Writers: Paulina Ukrainets and Vera Krichevskaya Director:  Vera Krichevskaya Charles Foster Kane famously thought it would be fun to run a newspaper. The same, blasé attitude seems to underlie Natasha Sindeeva’s decision to set-up an independent news TV station based in Russia. The growth (and decline) of Sindeeva’s station is mirrored by the remorseless rise of Vladimir Putin and F@ck This Job, Vera Krichevskaya’s documentary, describes the consequences of Russia’s increasingly intolerant attitude towards dissent for the station, the staff and the country as a whole. Krichevskaya sets a context for an odd decision to invest in a project that…

Writer: Juli Blachowiac Director: Scott Lazer West by God is the latest of Scott Lazer’s compelling 11-minute shorts. Where his documentary Visitors offered a wide-angled, wide-eyed glimpse of believers in extra-terrestrial life descending on the Nevada desert, Mango was a claustrophobic, pacy fiction about a woman’s secret erotic life, captured in the tiny frame of a smart phone. In West by God, Lazer again uses cinematographer Taylor McIntosh to create an evocative portrait, this time of small-town white America in his home state of West Virginia.  It’s summer at a water-park. Far off are the undifferentiated sounds of kids at…

Writer and Director:  Samuel Kay Forrest This rambling, if well meaning, film about self-discovery in the queer clubs of Berlin is certainly atmospheric, but it is also clumsy at times, and its 90-minute running time could do with a sharper edit. If anything, HipBeat proves that the nightlife in Berlin is remarkably more exciting than London’s scene. Angus, who grew up in Ireland, has travelled to Berlin where his father once lived. Berlin liberates Angus who is now a political activist fighting against fascism. What he actually does to break down the system is distinctly unclear. With a hoodie and…

Presenter: Nicholas Briggs A good story and careful characterisation are the essence of Doctor Who argued Victor Pemberton in the mid-1990s shortly after Paul McGann played the character. This former script writer who worked on the Patrick Trouton era was critical of the middle years of the series where the show had pulled away from what he felt was its essence and just one of the comments included in this new collection of documentary interviews and behind-the-scenes insights looking at the Patrick Troughton years in what will be a series of Doctor Who interview collections released on DVD and Blu-ray…

Director: Paul Holbrook Writter: Laura Bayston Steeped in shade, Old Windows centres on an encounter between two strangers. We are in South East London, and cafe owner Kerrie (played by Laura Bayston) is saying goodbye to her last customer of the day. As Kerrie surveys an empty till, we can observe that the cafe has seen better days. The cafe’s history – West Ham kit in pride of place, photos and posters up on the walls – is decades old and virtually untouched. It is not immediately obvious when we are, and director Paul Holbrook’s use of sepia plays on…

Writer: Naomi McDougall Jones Director: Meredith Edwards Death and taxes come together quite literally in Naomi McDougall Jones’ provocatively titled romcom Bite Me as a young vampire finds her exemption status questioned by the IRS. Dispelling a lot of vampire myths – no fangs, going out in daylight and only drinking donor blood to fix an energy deficiency – it may have a few twists, but McDougall-Jones’s film directed by Meredith Edwards is ultimately a cosy and very traditional example of its genre, as two lonely outsiders find, lose and find love again against the odds. Sarah is a determinedly…

Writer and Director:  Nicholas Ashe Bateman There should be a prize for making it to the end of Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s film which is as mystifying and as silly as its title. Set, presumably, in the future after a climate change event where the weather is now always hot and humid, people try to escape the heat on a ship that takes wild horses to a cooler temperate place. The Wanting Mare is as pretentious as it sounds. Why they take the horses to arctic temperatures is not explained, and it seems fairly unimportant to the main narrative, which instead…

Writers: Lau Ho-Leung and Liang Hong Director: Lau Ho-Leung Caught in Time, written by director Lau Ho-Leung with Liang Hong, is based upon the real-life story of robber Zhang Jun, who was dubbed “China’s number one outlaw” and said to have killed or injured around 50 people during the 1990s. Detective Zhong Cheng (Wang Qianyuan) has a poor first day on his new job. He interrupts a robbery by the notorious Eagle Gang but is overpowered and, at the whim of their leader Zhang Sun (Daniel Wu) nick- named The Falcon, dressed as a gang member, and left for his colleagues…