Author: The Reviews Hub - Film

Writer: Austin Kolodney Director: Gus Van Sant Dead Man’s Wire is a crime thriller based upon a real-life hostage standoff. Film fans might wonder if the presence of Al Pacino in the cast is a tribute to the classic movie Dog Day Afternoon which was also based upon a true-life hostage confrontation and featured Pacino as star. In 1977 Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) has a grievance against the Meridian Mortgage company run by wealthy mortgage broker M.L. Hall (Al Pacino). Having taken out a mortgage to acquire and develop an area of land Kiritsis alleges the company poached his potential…

Directors: Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard Marianne Faithfull was both an enigma and an icon. A key member of the 60s music scene, and later known for her resilience and recovery from heroin addiction, Faithfull is seen here in the final days of her life – she died during production – and although there is a framing device of some ministry interrogation into her memories, the conceit is really not needed. She is a brilliant, honest, and disparaging interviewee. Broken English – named after her seminal album of 1979 – somehow feels that is not enough, instead supplementing our view…

Director: Maciej J. Drygas Trains by Polish director Maciej J. Drygas is a mesmerising piece of story telling. Using only black and white archival footage of trains, trainworkers and passengers, it traces the momentous social and historical changes of the first half of the twentieth century. The fact that there is no voice-over, just Saulius Urbanavičius’s haunting sound design, intensifies the experience. We may repeatedly wonder whether a particular wartime clip shows people from an Allied country or that of an enemy one. But that’s the point. In its rhythm of repeated experiences – men, women and children lugging suitcase,…

Writers: Doriana Leondeff, Silvio Soldini, Lucio Ricca, Cristina Comencini, Giulia Calenda and Ilaria Macchia based upon the novel At the Wolf’s Table by Rosella Postorino Director: Silvio Soldini The Tasters is based upon a true story. There have been doubts raised about the veracity of the source material but director Silvio Soldini adheres to the advice that one should always favour the legend. In 1944 Germany Rosa Sauer (Elisa Schlott) jumps out of the frying pan into the fire. With her husband in the army and weary of the bombing raids she quits Berlin and seeks refuge with her in-laws…

Writer: Peter Howlett Director: Brendan Muldowney The two worlds of Danny Dyer meet in new single (visible) actor film One Last Deal and across its 90-minute running time it is like watching his career unfold in microcosm. Essentially a sports movie about a gruff manager type dealing with an unfolding real time crisis, there are some interesting ideas in here about the extremes to which sport infrastructure must go – in football particularly –  to protect the cash cow of a successful player whatever their indiscretions, but the sometimes ludicrous plot aside, the morphing of the central performance from classic-era…

Writers: Kei Ishikawa and Kazuo Ishiguro Directed by: Kei Ishikawa Although Kazuo Ishiguro described his debut novel as a “very bad book”, A Pale View of Hills with its gentle, elegiac tone, has a lot to recommend it. While Ishiguro has box office form with The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills, adapted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, is his most characteristic work. The story is split over two time periods, one in 1950s Nagasaki, the other in 1980s England. An ambitious journalist, Niki (played by Camilla Aiko), travels home to see…

Director: Felipe Bustos Sierra Looking at the world, it is easy to believe it is a terrible place, filled with corruption, inhumanity, intolerance, bigotry and aggression especially with constant media reports of war, the rise of the right and destruction of civilised life. But then you watch Everybody to Kenmure Street and it restores your faith in good, decent people, something we all desperately need to be reminded of. While Governments and world leaders try to reshape the map and as political groups and even the media try to sew dissent and division, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s film will make you…

Writers: David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky Director: David Bickerstaff Featuring the masters of the English landscape, it’s no surprise that Tate Britain named their current exhibition on Turner and Constable, “Rivals and Originals”. Even with broad similarities in their chosen genre, Turner has been depicted as a ground-breaking radical, exploring new techniques. Constable has been viewed as an artist more rooted in convention. His traditional landscapes, regularly painted in his beloved Suffolk, have been read as ‘safe’ and homely, compared to Turner’s swirling maelstrom clouds. In terms of artistic reputation, it could be argued that the rebel has won the…