Award Winning Independent Cinema

It’s fair to say that cinema has found a great deal to mine from Shakespeare. Whether it’s the man himself, hurrying along to the playhouse, trying to stave off writer’s block, in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, or Laurence Olivier’s smiling villain, played-to-camera, in … Continue Reading

With a career spanning five decades, how does one pack the full extent of David Bowie’s life and works into a single, 90-minute film? The answer, coming from this Channel 4 produced documentary, is simply, you don’t. Though sub-titled “The Final Act”, this film surprisingly – and at times frustratingly … Continue Reading

“I’ve always been so fascinated by characters and getting into their psyche” and Lynne Ramsay’s latest film Die My Love is no exception. In her fifth feature film, Ramsay once again proves her ability to dive into the psyche of complex characters, through a … Continue Reading

As Teddy Gatz tends his bee hives he is inspired to equate how their lives are influenced by higher forces, to how superior forces work on the human race. As they say on the TV show Ancient Aliens “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.” Yes, he’s … Continue Reading

Reviled (or revered) as the Bad Boy of Italian Art, Caravaggio’s reputation seems to be unassailable. The bravura artist that deployed chiaroscuro to bring a cinematic flair to religious iconography, his fan base extends far beyond the art world. The director Martin Scorsese remarked … Continue Reading

Back from a week at London Film Festival and looking forward to a packed November programme.
LFF always sounds like fun to people who don’t go but when every day starts with a tube ride at 7am to get to a queue in a cinema by 7.30am … Continue Reading

I am pretty sure it was around the release of the 25th Anniversary edition that I saw William Friedkin’s 1974 adaption of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist. At that time I used to go and see anything in the local arts centre or anything that caught my … Continue Reading

Taking inspiration from both the original 1981 novel, The War of the Roses and its 1989 film adaptation, The Roses reimagines the chaotic story of the destruction of a marriage after years of festering spousal resentment and (often self-inflicted) emotional trauma, all through the medium of acerbic one-liners and biting … Continue Reading