Song of the Sea Review – A Work of Majestic Beauty With Great Emotional Heft
Review by Andrew F Peirce
There is a quiet beauty that permeates through every frame of Song of the Sea. Rising from the painterly animation that seems to have dropped away from animated films in recent years, through to the smooth easy listening rolling of the Irish accent of the cast that voice the characters, Song of the Sea is nothing but beautiful. It’s beautiful…
Review by Andrew F Peirce
Sicario is the latest thriller from Prisoners and Enemy director, Denis Villeneuve. I mistakenly made the comment on Twitter that he was an ‘up and coming director’ and thankfully someone corrected me with the fact that Villeneuve has been in the game for about twenty years. Thanks to Villeneuve’s English language films though, I’ve now got another great foreign director to jump down the rabbit hole with.
Sicario – which we are told…
Jaws: The First Blockbuster and Its Legacy Forty Years On
Article by Andrew F Peirce
There’s no denying it, Jaws is a great film. It’s one of the most accessible horror films around alongside The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense. Alongside The Silence of the Lambs and The Sixth Sense, Jaws was nominated for Best Picture.
How could it not be? It is the first major blockbuster. Launching on around 400 screens, it earned its budget back…
The Witch Review – Will Wrap You Up in a Blanket of Fear
Review by Andrew F Peirce
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately – Robert Eggers The Witch (or The VVitch: A New-England Folktale) is not for everyone. If you scroll down the bottom before reading this review, you may see that I give this a 4.5/5 and think ‘well, I’ll trundle along and go see this film I will’. If you’re familiar with my feelings…
Review by Andrew F Peirce
One of the better horror films to come out this year is Kirby Dick’s documentary The Hunting Ground. Whilst the majority of the film is not played for horror, there is simply no denying the fact that this is a real life horror film through and through. On par with Errol Morris’ essential documentary, The Fog of War, The Hunting Ground is a damning expose of the epidemic of sexual assault…
Tehran Taxi Review – Yet Another Non-Film Masterpiece from Jafar Panahi
Review by Andrew F Peirce
Filmed from the perspective of security cameras in a taxi, Tehran Taxi is the latest non-film from director Jafar Panahi. Just like This Is Not a Film, Panahi uses these security cameras to document what occurs within the taxi. The feel is instead of a pseudo-documentary in the strain of 20,000 Days on Earth where the subject on display is more a created reality…
Review by Andrew F Peirce
2015 will most likely go down as the year of the successful reboot. Jurassic World is (at time of writing) the biggest film of the year, Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the years biggest and best action films, Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks to be the film to wash away the memories of the prequels. Enter Creed – the latest entry in the Rocky franchise. Unlike the aforementioned films, Creed…
Director Matthew Rankin on the kindness that sits at the core of Universal Language
Interview by Andrew F Peirce
Matthew Rankin is a Canadian filmmaker who hails from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work, which includes the acclaimed award-winning 2019 feature The Twentieth Century, has often been called ‘experimental’ or a slice of ‘absurdist comedy’. That’s partially true, but I’d go a step further and say that there’s a touch of humanist storytelling to his work, one that’s crafted from a globalist…
Straight Outta Compton Review – Engaging Biopic that Outstays Its Welcome
Review by Andrew F Peirce
Like many a white Australian male growing up in the nineties, I liked to think I knew what good rap was. Besides listening to Gangsta’s Paradise and Fuck the Police a lot, it was mostly Public Enemy that I was interested in. That didn’t stop the idea of sitting through a film about NWA sound interesting and exciting.The amount of black band biopics out…
Review by Andrew F Peirce
My favourite documentary of all time is Jehane Noujaim’s 2004 Control Room. A film about the media’s involvement in the Iraq War in the early 2000’s, with special focus on Al Jazeera. It’s a heartbreaking documentary, but also a stark depiction of the role of journalism in wars. With this in mind, I came to David Bradbury’s documentary Frontline with the view that it was almost a pseudo-prequel to Control Room.
Focusing on…
Review by Andrew F Peirce
Trying to find fitting words to describe a film like Youth is like trying to find the perfect line of dialogue to fill a person’s final words. It’s hard, it most likely won’t be right, but you’ll try anyhow – just like the screenwriters who assist Harvey Keitel’s Frank at writing a script about life. Sometimes saying nothing at all fits just as well as a monologue.
Paolo Sorrentino’s film follows aging composer…
A Nightmare on Elm Street Review
Review by Andrew F Peirce
I was aware of the terror that is Freddy Kruger long before I ever saw a A Nightmare on Elm Street film. In 1991 or 1992 – I can’t recall the exact year – my family went to the Brisbane Royal Show. Walking through a tunnel, a kid with a hat, a mask and a glove with knives on them jumped in front of us and screamed. I was…