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The Killer Inside Me – Review
27th July 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
A great deal has been made of the unrestrained violence in Michael Winterbottom’s languid, dusky pulp thriller The Killer Inside Me, the English director’s bold adaption of Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel of the same name. And with very good reason: its ferocity is shocking.
Throughout, brutality and sadism are churning just below the surface, threatening to shatter the eerie calm, to twist the affability and easy-going climate of its small... -
War by Sebastian Junger
11th June 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
War is the astonishing new book from author, journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger. Expanding on a series of articles published in Vanity Fair in 2008, it documents the 15 months he and British photographer Tim Hetherington spent embedded with the 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, one of the most hostile and violent combat theatres in the Afghan conflict. Korangal, a place Junger describes as “Afghanistan’s...
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I Am Love
8th April 2010 | 3 comments | 1 person likes this
Very rarely a film will break out from the fringes of the medium, from the rarified world of cineaste festivals and art house screenings into a broader mainstream consciousness and, through a series of mesmeric flourishes, transcendent jolts, diaphanously nuanced performances or the sheer scope of its artistic ambition will reaffirm the power of cinema to conjure magnificent and unique acts of arousal and awakening. As 2009 tipped into 2010... -
Review: A Prophet
3rd March 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Where James Toback’s 1978 drama Fingers was the inspiration for Jacques Audiard’s celebrated 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for the pulsating, brutal and achingly tense prison drama A Prophet the French director has mined the likes of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jules Dassin and Jean-Pierre Melville to create a instant genre classic and an audacious piece of cinematic story telling. It is the standout film of the... -
Album review: Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here
9th February 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Gil Scott-Heron, arguably the most influential poet to come out of America in the last fifty years, the master chronicler of American mistrust and arch social provocateur, has released his first album since 1996’s Spirits and twenty-eight years after his last release for Arista Records, Moving Targets. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap has emerged from this extended hiatus, part spent incarcerated on Riker’s Island for cocaine... -
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
9th February 2010 | 4 comments | 1 person likes this
In Sarah Bakewell’s versatile, brilliant and joyful account of Michel de Montaigne’s life and work there is a quote from poet and author Leonard Woolf proposing the 16th century French philosopher to be “the first completely modern man” with an “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and all other human beings.” Reading Bakewell’s book, and Montaigne’s Essays themselves, one becomes acutely aware of exactly how... -
44 Inch Chest
19th January 2010 | 2 comments | 1 person likes this
44 Inch Chest is the new shouty, faakin’, Cock-er-nee tear up from the writers of Sexy Beast. There are enough “f***s” and “c***s” to make an Amsterdam stag party blush, a heavy dose of East End ribaldry and plenty of bone-cracking and blood-spilling to lightly scratch the itch of a certain kicking-out time demographic. It also stars two very, very fine actors from that earlier film, Ray Winstone and Ian...
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The Road – a gruelling journey
14th January 2010 | 0 comments | 1 person likes this
John Hillcoat’s grueling, faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name is a bleak and authentic exercise in cinematic stamina that leaves you emotionally drained and adrift. It is set entirely within a destroyed landscape and if there is more than an element of Beckettian hopelessness, and helplessness, to the narrative then, the wavering and oft tested moral impulsion of the protagonists aside, we are left...
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And now for something a little different…
9th January 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Ever get the feeling that life is just one spirit-crushing, face-slapping calamity after another?
I was ambling happily along Camden High St on my way back from lunch today, running the usual gauntlet of heroin addicts, charity muggers and Kestrel drinkers and dreaming lazily of nothing much in particular, when I skidded wildly across a particularly fruity patch of ice and landed squarely on my coccyx. As I writhed limply on... -
Precious – a difficult film?
7th January 2010 | 1 comments | 1 person likes this
Precious, Lee Daniels’s screen adaptation of the 1997 novel, Push, by New York poet Sapphire, is less a rollercoaster of emotion than a nine-pound sledgehammer of unrelenting torment that hits you right between the eyes. From a critical perspective this is both a curse and blessing. Indeed, so disturbing are some of the key moments that, dare I say it, by the final quarter one starts to become relatively inured...
CONTRIBUTOR
Nick Clarke
Working in advertising, writing for a number of national newspaper and magazine titles and currently clawing his way through his PhD in film, Nick has nurtured a passion for media and the arts for over a decade. He tries not to take himself too seriously but finds it difficult. As such he harbours the faintly ridiculous belief that one- day he will write a definitive, universally lauded book on a subject that he thinks he knows something about. Given that he is fanatical about Soul music, 1970s cinema and boxing, it might be about one of those. Given that he also is very indecisive and non-committal it also might not be.
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