Latest reviews

Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994, UK)

Shallow Grave, British director Danny Boyle’s debut feature film, is about the disintegration of friendship under the strain of greed. It’s also a bleak social study of three bright but blinded intellectuals who’ve allowed callous opportunism defeat any moral grounding. It’s certainly a daring, hard-edged low-budget thriller that paints a dark, almost dangerous view, of the young, middle-class characters it portrays. But it’s also a very astute investigation of the primal forces that drive human beings. Indeed, the three main characters display the primitive form of Freud’s theory of personality development when they allow their moral judgment to be governed by the pleasure of having lots and lots of money. (READ FULL REVIEW)

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006, USA)

I looked at the running time before beginning to watch Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama and thought it might be too long. My girlfriend certainly thought so – she was asleep after half an hour and woke up with about forty minutes left. As I tried to bring her up to speed with what had happened, I found myself breathlessly retelling events without a pit-stop for oxygen or chance for her to really take it all in. When I finally said, ‘so that’s it, I’ll just pause it and go for a wee,’ I realised I was on the edge of my seat (an exceptionally comfortable sofa) and had been for the past hour and a half. As I relieved myself of half a bottle of wine I knew, as I reminisced about the film, I was experiencing Scorsese’s most polished and entertaining film since Goodfellas. (READ FULL REVIEW)

The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, UK)

Not that I can fault Helen Mirren who deserves her Academy Award for best performance. Her portrayal of the Queen is mannered and at times amusing. Yet, putting the royal family into a drama about tragedy and loss is both over-sentimentalising a relic that doesn’t deserve such attention, and caricaturing famed figures whose lives are already constructs of media derision and, at times, fascination. It’s most telling that Alistair Campbell’s scorn and egocentric asides are the most truthful and believable attributes of a film that first asks its audience to suspend their disbelief, and then asks us to suspend our disbelief for the over-privileged, out-of-date, out-of-touch royal family. When it comes to the second part, it becomes increasingly difficult and awfully easy to find ‘oneself’ shouting words like ‘robots’ and ‘who are ya’ at the screen. (READ FULL REVIEW)