The directorial debut of actor Ralph Fiennes (Harry Potter), Coriolanus is a ferocious modern day adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. Headlined by Fiennes himself, and bolstered by a staggering cast of supporting players, this appropriately theatrical tale of wartime politics makes some questionably antiquated statements about class, but nevertheless captivates thanks to towering performances, gritty cinematography and – at the risk of stating the obvious – [...]

By the half-hour mark of Project X — a found footage flick about a teenage house party spiralling out of control — the film had achieved something neither A Serbian Film nor Human Centipede 2, with all their graphic depictions of rape and torture, could not. It offended me.

A celebration of homophobia, misogyny, lawlessness, mindlessness and the total absence of empathy, decency, intellect and good taste, Project X is [...]

A seven minute mockumentary short that looks as good as any feature length Western, Jared Varava’s Tumbleweed!, written by older brother Justin Varava, recounts the fictional history of the titular tumbleweed with perfect deadpan intelligence and timing. Droll voiceover narration sets the scene in the small town of Alacrity, North Texas, where in 1807 prospector J. Herbert Tumble was first entranced by the sight of dry plant-matter rolling [...]

Even the combined charisma of Denzel Washington (The Taking of Pelham 123) and Ryan Reynolds (Green Lantern) can’t make Safe House seem like anything other than the derivative and unengaging nonsense that it is. After being captured in Cape Town, traitorous CIA agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is transported to a local safe house operated by low-level agent Matt Weston (Reynolds), a man frustrated with the lack of career [...]

On the night of November 9, 1989, the ground-breaking gay film Coming Out was set to premiere to an East German repressed, homosexual audience, but fatefully, another ground-breaking event occurred that night: the Berlin Wall came down. As co-director Ringo Rösener narrates in his and Markus Stein’s Panorama documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der Ddr (Among Men — Gay In East Germany), the gay GDR community was robbed that [...]

A charming comedy set in the cutthroat world of Norway’s least popular sport, Ole Endresen’s Curling King was a colossal audience hit at this year’s International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Co-writer Atle Antonsen (a popular Norwegian comedian) also stars as Truls Paulsen, a once champion curler whose manic obsession with the sport eventually saw him institutionalised with obsessive compulsive disorder. Released after a decade – heavily medicated – into the [...]