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Videos relating to tag 'ben howard'
21 results
Reel Weekend | 25 April 2008
Based on a graphic novel, the beautifully hand-drawn, black-and-white Persepolis is an autobiographical story of Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian woman who spent the first decade of her life living a relatively happy childhood in Tehran, before being packed off to Vienna by her liberal parents. The film is a masterclass in economic story-telling, effectively condensing many years into just over 90 minutes, and Satrapi and writer-director Vincent Paronnaud manage to find verbal and visual humour in even the darkest of situations.
Reel Weekend | 25 April 2008
Horror flick The Eye is directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who proved last year that they could deliver the scary goods with the French shocker Them. Unfortunately they seem to have left everything that made that film so successful in their homeland because The Eye is about as generic as Hollywood horror gets. The movie plays like a Frankenstein's monster of recent horror hits, and the scriptwriters are so aware that this material is utterly derivative that they even include a jokey reference to The Sixth Sense in the dialogue.
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh's debut feature In Bruges is probably the first hitman movie to be set in Belgium, a country better known for worryingly fruity beer, Poirot and Jean Claude Van Damme than a violent criminal underworld. The hitmen in this case are a pair of Irishmen, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who come to the quaint medieval town of the title to cool off after a hit back in London goes wrong...
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Protégé is a gritty new Hong Kong thriller that's been a massive hit in its homeland. It's a hard-hitting anti-drugs tale in which a cop called Nick has spent seven years infiltrating a heroin gang, run by grey-haired Lin Quin (Andy Lau). It manages to mix some old-school cop high-jinks with a tough addiction drama, and although you've seen it before, the cat-and-mouse game between gang boss and undercover rozzer is grippingly told, with some first-rate acting from upcoming star Daniel Wu, as well as veteran Lau.
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Kit Ryan's Botched is an Irish-funded but Russia-set movie that begins like any other heist flick – a veteran thief is forced to do one last job by mobsters after a diamond robbery goes badly wrong. Unfortunately for our hero (played by Colin Farrell), but luckily for the audience, this job ends up involving gun-toting nuns, exploding rats and a psychotic killer who believes he is the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler.
Movie Review: Lars and the Real Girl
Reel Weekend | 28 March 2008
The tale of a man and his relationship with a life-size sex doll is not what you'd immediately consider could make a genuinely moving love story, but Lars and the Real Girl somehow manages to combine humour with a poignant look at loneliness and the fragility of the human mind. The emotionally troubled Lars meets Bianca, the girl of his dreams, however unfortunately for Lars he believes she's a living, breathing human being...
Reel Weekend | 20 March 2008
The Orphanage is very much in keeping with producer Guillermo del Toro's brand of chiller, which blends visceral shocks with moving character-based drama. It's the story of a couple who decide to reopen an old orphanage, but find their lives torn apart when their adopted son goes missing. In general it relies on a build-up of tension and uncomfortable psychological anguish rather than traditional shocks, however it does contain one of the single best jump-out-your-seat frights since Carrie decided that being buried wasn't much fun after all...
Movie Review: Meet the Spartans
Reel Weekend | 20 March 2008
Meet the Spartans is, without doubt, the worst film we've reviewed on Reel Weekend to date. It's the latest in a line of comedies that began with Scary Movie and can only end when the likes of Friedberg, Seltzer and the Wayans brothers are publicly hanged. Like its predecessors, it has a habit of replacing actual jokes with irrelevant references to recent pop culture, and to top it off, finds it necessary to explain those references seconds after they've been screened...
Reel Weekend | 14 March 2008
The Cottage, directed by Paul Andrew Williams and starring none other than Brookside's Jennifer Ellison, is a worthy entrant to the splatter comedy genre. It fuses broad comedic farce with gory horror thrills, with plenty of limbs getting lopped off, farm implements being put to inappropriate use and shovels through faces. It manages to be a whole lot of fun once it hits its stride...
Reel Weekend | 14 March 2008
Director Brian De Palma returns to his low-budget roots with Redacted. The film was shot on high-def video for an American cable channel and looks at life in Iraq for a squad of American soldiers in typically controversial style. It focuses upon the brutal rape of an Iraqi girl by out-of-control American soldiers, and while it's not exactly subtle and doesn't tell us much we don't already know, it's pretty powerful stuff.
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