Category Archives: Film

Venus In Fur, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.AC.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric.

Foreign language films in Britain do tend to attract a niche audience but that should not deter any fan of cinema from attending a showing of Director Roman Polanski’s film Venus in Fur.

In the U.K. audiences do tend to be split in the appreciation of a good film that has travelled across the deep waters of the Channel, it is a shame but it does happen. If an exception should be made for a film in the last ten years then Venus in Fur should be top of the pile. For this highly charged, message filled, erotic and electrifying piece of cinema, the limits of enjoyment are only placed by the confines of the mind’s refusal to accept something new and something truly fascinating, even enthralling and most of all completely and wonderfully strange.

Belle, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Tom Wilkinson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Emily Watson, Sam Reid, Tom Felton, James Norton, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, Sarah Gadon, Matthew Goode, Lauren Julien-Box, Natasha Williams, Alan McKenna, Timothy Walker, David Gant, Charlotte Roach, Rupert Wickham, Bethan Mary-James, Alana Ramsey, Alex Jennings, Daniel Wilde, Susan Brown, James Northcote, Andrew Woodall, Edmund Short, Christopher Middleton.

Pride meets extremism prejudice in Misan Sagay’s well written script for the film Belle.

Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets. Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T., Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Richard Hawley, Steve Mackey, Mark Webber, The People of Sheffield.

Despite their best efforts, there was more to British music other than Blur and Oasis in the mid-1990s. The hyped up Brit-Pop phenomenon that saw British music on the crest of a wave built up by hope, a certain amount of propaganda and teenage excitement rather than idealism and realism would soon come tumbling down and thankfully since around 2003, music has gained a perspective, even the enjoyment of discovery again.

Jimmy’s Hall. Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Andrew Scott, Jim Norton, Brian F. O’Byrne, Paul Fox, Sorcha Fox, Aisling Franciosi, Karl Geary, Denise Gough, Aileen Henry, Seamus Hughes, Francis Magee, Conor McDermottroe.

For as long as Ken Loach is alive and well, there really should be no reason for him to ever give up film making. As his latest piece, Jimmy’s Hall, shows that where there is a story involving social commentary, of wrongs visited upon a particular person, there should be a person to be able to tell it and they don’t come any better than Ken Loach.

Edge Of Tomorrow, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Paxton, Jonas Armstrong, Tony Way, Terrance Maynard, Kick Gurry, Franz Drameh, Charlotte Riley, Dragomir Mrsic, Masayoshi Haneda, Lara Pulver, Madeleine Mantock,
Assly Zandry, Sebastian Blunt, Beth Goddard, Ronan Summers, Aaron Romano, Usman Akram, Bentley McKinley, Andrew Neil, Martin Hyder, Tommy Campbell, John Dutton, Harry Landis, Rachel Handshaw, Martin McDougal, Jane Hill,  Anna Botting. 

X-Men: Days of Future Past, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender,  Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, Shawn Ashmore, Omar Sy, Daniel Cudmore, Evan Peters, Fan Bingbing, Josh Helman, Ellen Page,  Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer, Adan Canto, Booboo Stewart, Lucas Till, Evan Jonigkeit, Gregg Lowe, Mark Camacho, James Marsden, Famke Janssen.

Fading Gigolo, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T., Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Review 7/10

Cast: John Turturro, Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Vanessa Paradis, Lieb Schreiber, Max Casella, Aida Turturro, Michael Badalucco, Aurélie Claudel, Loan Chabanol.

Fading Gigolo he maybe in a film but there is nothing faded, jaded or withered about John Turturro as a writer or as a film maker.

When Fioravante, John Turturro, helps purveyor of old and rare books Murray, Woody Allen, help finally close his shop due to the economic times we live in, it sets of a chain of events that sees the two impoverished men turn the tide slightly back in their favour by the under-discussed subject of prostitution for rich female clients.

The Two Faces Of January, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst, David Warshofsky, Daisy Bevan, Yigit Özsener, Nikos Mavrakis, Prometheus Aleifer, Ozan Tas, Socrates Alafouzos, James Sobol Kelly, Evgenia Dimitropoulou, Omiros Poulakis, Brian Niblett, Mehmet Esen, Pablo Verdejo, Okan Avci, Kosta Kortidis, Karayianni Margaux, Peter Mair.

The Two Faces of January is a film in which the tension, fuelled by the appearances of unrivalled brinkmanship and matchless testosterone, excels. It delves into the culture of violence briefly but that is the point, it is an intelligent enough adaptation to realise that films don’t need to go down the route of overwhelming forceful aggression to make it worth watching. The violence that happens is more through circumstance of two men caught in a trap of their own making and of jealousy. The prize is not just freedom in the end it seems.

Godzilla (2014), Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, CJ Adams, Ken Watanabe, Carson Bolde, Sally Hawkins, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn, Richard T. Jones, Victor Rasuk, Patrick Sabongui, Jared Keeso, Luc Roderique, James Pizzinato, Catherine Lough Hagguist, Eric Keenleyside, Primo Allon, Ken Yamamura, Hiro Kanagawa, Yuki Morita.

Every generation gets the Godzilla they deserve. The 1990’s debacle starring Matthew Broderick thankfully can now be put to bed as the nightmare it was and audiences in the second decade of the 21st Century can breathe easy knowing they at least have got a monster so cool that it practically makes all other versions somehow seem vastly inferior.

Bad Neighbours, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T. Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating *

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron, Dave Franco, Brian Huskey, Ike Barinholtz, Carla Gallo, Halston Sage, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lisa Kudrow, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts, Ali Cobrin, Hannibal Buress.

 

It seriously makes you worry for the future of American comedy if all a studio can come up with is a film that relies far too much displaying the bodily differences between the two main male leads, more needless swearing than you find underlined in a dictionary by somebody with limited vocabulary and an over reliance on showcasing the university fraternity system and their spat with modern day suburbia. It has been down before, with better artistry, finer scripts and with a couple of notable exceptions with better leads and supporting cast. Bad Neighbours is no Animal House. It even has the dubious pleasure of somehow managing to make the National Lampoon films seem like gold dust.