Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A searing, dramatically potent, quietly devastating film from New Zealand, In My Father’s Den is the debut feature by writer-director Brad McGann. Based on a novel by Maurice Gee, the film explores the tragic events that befall a small South Island community when one of its long-lost sons returns home. Paul Prior (Matthew McFadyen) is a celebrated but world-weary war photographer who, following the death of his father, returns to his childhood home to seek reconciliation with his brother Andrew (Colin Moy) and sister-in-law Penny (Miranda Otto) and sort out their estate. While exploring in the old house, Paul stumbles across a long forgotten escape: the den of the title, where he and his father once shared their love of life and literature, and where he and his old girlfriend Jax (Jodie Rimmer) explored teenage passions. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Shallow Ground is the debut international feature from young director Sheldon Wilson, a low-budget independent horror movie with lots of good ideas, but a disappointing lack of sense and professionalism. It focuses on a small sheriff station in a remote California mountain town, staffed by three officers (Timothy V. Murphy, Stan Kirsch, Lindsey Stoddart), all of whom are packing up, ready to leave town following the completion of building work on a nearby dam. Their journey is halted, however, by the macabre appearance of a naked teenage boy (Rocky Marquette), covered from head to toe in blood, who refuses to speak, but who emits a palpable sense of malevolence and menace. Thus begins a terrible night for the Sheriff and his deputies, who try to piece together the mystery of who – or what – this boy is, and what his appearance has to do with the unsolved murder of a local girl a year previously. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The general consensus about the fifth modern Batman movie, Batman Begins, is that the franchise has finally been revitalised. Personally, I always considered Joel Schumacher, the director of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, to have completely undermined the effectiveness of the series, shattering the feelings of gothic grandeur Tim Burton initiated and replacing it with gaudy, neon-lit overkill. In the hands of director Christopher Nolan – whose previous films include the excellent thrillers Memento and Insomnia – Batman Begins is a more introspective film that tempers its large-scale action scenes with a thoughtful, serious edge that marks, for me at least, a step in the right direction. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the kind of high-concept action movies that Hollywood often unleashes during the summer months, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a knockabout action-comedy from director Doug Liman. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie star as happily married couple John and Jane Smith who, unbeknownst to each other, work as assassins for rival firms. For a while, and with the exception of the occasional trip to a marriage guidance counsellor, all is rosy in the suburban Smith household – until, one day, two different clients hire them to eliminate the same target, and the pair discover the truth about each other. With their covers blown, all hell breaks loose, initiating the mother of all domestics… Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Regular readers of Movie Music UK will know by now that I am a huge fan of the BBC TV series The League of Gentlemen, an unremittingly twisted comedy creation which follows the lives of the inhabitants of fictional English town of Royston Vasey. Having built up something of a cult following since its debut in 1999, it was to be expected that a cinematic spin-off would follow – and so we have The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, a deliciously dark satire with hints of Hammer horror and even time travel!
Directed by regular TV helmsman Steve Bendelack, Apocalypse begins when the inhabitants of Royston Vasey discover that they are fictional creations, dreamed up by the twisted imaginations of writers Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reese Shearsmith. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
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