Music
A Start Is Born
“It’s the same story told over and over, forever.” That this is the fourth incarnation of A Star Is Born is clearly not lost on writer, director and star Bradley Cooper. This line, spoken towards the end of the film, echo...
La La Land
From its seven Oscar, and then six when it turned out Bonnie & Clyde had nearly robbed Moonlight, La La Land remained the true darling of this year’s awards season. Many sighted it was because Hollywood didn’t make musicals...
Supersonic
Watching Oasis documentary Supersonic something very sad begins to dawn. It forces you to look at the current musicians that capture the ideals of youth culture and you realise that rock stars are a dying, if not a dead, breed....
Absolute Beginners
The early 1980s were a terrible time for British cinema. Having allowed television to steal most of its audience and failed to compete against the juggernaut that was post-Star Wars Hollywood, the British film business entered ...
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Russ Meyer is part of a generation of American directors who owe much of their fame to the failures of the proceeding generation. Meyer served his cinematic apprenticeship in the US Army as a combat cameraman during World War I...
Eden
There is a moment at around the midpoint of Eden in which one of the characters waxes lyrical about the importance of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. While his friends belittle his taste he informs them that Verhoeven wanted to mak...
Pitch Perfect 2
With the first Pitch Perfect hitting the top of the box office charts to the tune of over a hundred million dollars, and the same on the home entertainment market, Pitch Perfect 2 was an inevitable second album. But can the Bar...
Beyond The Lights
Beyond the Lights is peppered with the constant blink and flash of cameras. Wherever main character Noni goes she is followed by the persistent call of strangers, with every moment spent in the public eye recorded, photographed...
Annie
It’s an Annie with mobile phones, twitter, movie premiers and helicopters. A far cry from where either of the previous renditions has ever taken the audience. In this remake Director Will Gluck seems to swing back and forth bet...
Begin Again
Director John Carney returns to a similar topic of inspiration that brought him so much success with Once in Begin Again. In fact so similar are the basic premises of Once and Begin Again it could easily be seen as a more mains...
20,000 Days On Earth
Of all Australia’s sons and daughters to have found spiritual acceptance in the mother country Nick Cave, star and focus of the fascinating documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, is perhaps the most unexpected. The musician wh...
Frank
Based very loosely on writer Jon Ronson’s time as a keyboardist in Frank Sidebottom’s band, Frank is a film that offers the very definition of quirky. But, after Ronson’s other filmic enterprise The Men Who Stare At Goats, woul...
Inside Llewyn Davis
Loosely inspired by, rather than religiously based on, the memoirs of celebrated folk singer Dave Von Ronk Inside Llewyn Davis is a quintessential Coen Brothers’ film. As only they can achieve the film manages to be everything ...
The Piano
If you’ve never seen The Piano, Jane Campion‘s multi-award-winning, wind-swept love story from 1993, Studiocanal might just have put an end to your excuses with a new, lovingly assembled disc that features an imposs...
Muscle Shoals
Greg Camalier’s debut feature, Muscle Shoals, charts the unlikely story of a sleepy Alabama town that emerged as the creative epicentre for a signature sound coveted by some of the greatest musicians of all-time. Remarkably the...
Good Vibrations DVD Review
Just the title, Good Vibrations, conjures up images of 1960s’ Beach Boys’ California sun and surf, or post-Woodstock hippy love and peace, but it is a much bleaker setting of 1970s’ Belfast that this story of...
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles
Originally broadcast as part of Tony Palmer’s groundbreaking and hugely ambitious fifteen hour long series, All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, the critically acclaimed British director’s superb segment on The Bea...
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
Lost for more than 38 years Tony Palmer’s breathtakingly beautiful recreation of the original 1974 film, ‘Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire’, follows the musician, poet, and novelist during his lengthy and at times fractious tour a...
