Cherokee Summer selects her Five Essential Natalie Portman Films… With ear-deafening reviews flooding out of the festival circuit, praising Natalie Portman’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s (The Wrestler) trippy, psychological thriller Black Swan (arriving on UK shores for its UK premiere at The London Film Festival in a few weeks), we take a look at Natalie […]

London River, 2009. Directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Starring Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyaté. SYNOPSIS: Two strangers journey to London in search of their children who are missing in the aftermath of the July 7th terror attacks. Forgive my sexism here, but seeing as I’m not a middle-aged-to-elderly female it’s pretty safe to say that a […]

DJ Haza talks Top Gun in more “Frustrated Ramblings Of An Aspiring Filmmaker”… Stinger: “Don’t screw around with me Maverick. You’re a hell of an instinctive pilot. Maybe too good. I’d like to bust your butt but I can’t. I got another problem here. I gotta send somebody from this squadron to Miramar. I gotta […]

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 2010. Directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, Eli Wallach, Frank Langella and Susan Sarandon. SYNOPSIS: After emerging from prison disgraced corporate raider Gordon Gecko partners with a young Wall Street broker and sets out to alert the financial community to the impending economic […]

A Town Called Panic (French: Panique au village), 2009. Directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar. Featuring the voice talents of Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Jeanne Balibar, Bouli Lanners and Benoît Poelvoorde. SYNOPSIS: A trio of plastic toys embark on a series of surreal adventures. Due to the predictability and unoriginality of a large proportion […]

Despicable Me, 2010. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud. Featuring the voice talents of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand and Julie Andrews. SYNOPSIS: Evil supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) finds out he’s not the number one villain anymore and has been replaced by a younger, arrogant teen named Vector (Jason Segel). Determined the return […]

With his latest film The Social Network in cinemas this month, Trevor Hogg profiles the career of director David Fincher in the second of a three part feature… read part one here. After the production turmoil associated with his directorial debut Alien 3 (1992), American moviemaker David Fincher had given up on the idea of […]

A Single Man, 2009. Directed by Tom Ford. Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult and Matthew Goode. SYNOPSIS: After the death of his long-time companion, a middle-aged college professor decides to kill himself and goes about getting his affairs in order in what would otherwise be a normal day. I’ve seen A Single Man […]

Withnail & I, 1987. Directed by Bruce Robinson. Starring Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths and Ralph Brown. SYNOPSIS: Two unemployed and down-on-their-luck actors take a holiday in the countryside. Trapped inside a dank, empty cabin with an endless downpour of heavy rain, the two men form a complicated bond fuelled by booze, disaster, […]

American: The Bill Hicks Story, 2009. Directed by Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas. SYNOPSIS: Photo-animated documentary on the life of comedian’s comedian Bill Hicks. Now here’s an odd fish. A film about the life of Bill Hicks that’s roughly half as vitriolic, hardly anywhere near as controversial, and barely a fraction as funny as the […]