THE PROFESSIONAL Starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in her film debut, Léon tells the tale of the titular Hitman and his unlikely personal and professional relationship with eleven-year-old Mathilda. After Mathilda’s dysfunctional drug-running family are murdered by corrupt DEA agent Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), the orphan finds refuge in her mysterious neighbour. Upon discovering […]
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WHAT A RUSH Rebels, lunatics, dreamers; the three words Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) chooses to describe himself, and his fellow Formula One drivers, within the opening monologue of Rush. Beginning its true-to-life narrative upon the fateful day of the 1976 German Grand Prix, a race in which Lauda was severely injured and permanently disfigured, the […]
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CINEMA BELLISSIMO Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) recounts the tale of Jep Gambardella, a sixty-five-year-old journalist whose sole yet highly successful novel has afforded him a dazzling lifestyle amidst the decadent lives of Rome’s upper-class bourgeois. Despite focusing upon a singular protagonist in Jep, and his journey through the opulent yet increasingly […]
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CITY OF DEMONS Without a shadow of a doubt Only God Forgives is one of the most unsettling, relentlessly oppressive and utterly compelling films of the 21st century. It is not a typical Nicolas Winding-Refn picture, nor is it a typical Ryan Gosling flick, and using 2011’s Drive as our primary piece of empirical evidence, […]
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EPIC SENSIBILITIES Today, if you type ‘Heaven’s Gate’ into Google your first result will be for a Wikipedia entry regarding the San Diego ‘UFO based Doomsday cult’ of the same name. Sadly, similarly to many 1970’s cults, things went south in the form of a mass-suicide as opposed to the interstellar direction its members were […]
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FILM IN WORDS 