Jackie by Pablo Larraín - Review

“There won’t be another Camelot. Not another Camelot.” Jackie Kennedy says to herself — both as a statement about the country passing into darker times and as reassurance about her husband’s legacy. Grief and myth collide in director Pablo Larraín’s intimate study of the person most affected by one of America’s greatest tragedies.

Allow me to be cliché and call Natalie Portman’s performance here a revelation. The control of slipping between reality and artifice is incredible – her wandering around the white house with no direction makes the film feel more like a ghost story than anything resembling a biopic. And not since Tom Hardy’s Bane has a voice been so bizarrely engrossing.

Does the Ending of Split Work? SPOILERS

M Night Shyamalan is still best known for The Sixth Sense (1999) after all these years, and its ending that probably has one of the best known twists in the history of film. His career had never quite matched this success until Split (2017), which came top of the box office last weekend in the USA, largely thanks to the promise of one of his trademark twist endings. But does it work? SPOILERS (well, duh!).

The Final Girls or The Final Girl of Cairo

If, like me, you were an fan of horror films in the 80’s/90’s, you’ll remember the final girls, one of the most regular tropes of slashers. You’ll also remember the actresses who played them, or perhaps not, as none of them ever had much of a career after their brief turn in the limelight, and in those pre-IMDB days, you had no idea what had happened to them. Most probably smaller parts in barely seen films, bit parts on TV and little else.

FilmLand Empire Top 5 of 2016

I have asked my contributors to list their top 5 films of 2016, without giving them any particular rules. A few years ago I had launched the "bloggies", doing a round up of blogger top film lists but I feel that is far more interesting to publish each writer's own list, as it is a lot more personal that way, so here they are, including mine!

Manchester By The Sea by Kenneth Lonergan - Review

December marks the beginning of snowy weather, hot cocoa, and seeing your relatives wayyyy too much, but for cinephiles it also marks the beginning of an onslaught of potentially great films every weekend. There are a few contenders for the best film of the year so far. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan has thrown his new film, Manchester By the Sea, into the ring.

Casey Affleck gives the best male performance of the year as Lee, a Boston handyman who gets a phone call telling him that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of a heart attack. Lee returns home to Manchester, a fishing town in Massachusetts, to set up the funeral and figure out what to do with Joe's son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a teen who he used to be close with.

The Black Hen by Min Bahadur Bham - Review

Nepal seems to be having something of a moment on the big screen, with Hollywood blockbusters like Everest (2015) and Doctor Strange (2016) setting scenes in the Himalayan nation as a novel new arena for adventure and spiritual self-discovery. But that’s for tourists. Here’s the real deal. The debut feature from director Min Bahadur Bham won Best Film during Critics Week at last year’s Venice Film Festival and proves to be an accomplished meditation on its creator’s childhood growing up amidst the Maoist Insurgency, a conflict tat saw the country drawn into a bloody civil war between 1996 and 2006.

Certain Women by Kelly Reichardt - Review

The opening image of director Kelly Reichardt’s new film is mountains looming over the barren landscape of Montana and then the sound and light of a train enters frame to slowly take command of the screen. It signals an entrance, or rather, an intrusion into a quiet and forgotten world. 

Certain Women is about observing the most intimate, and insignificantly significant moments in the mundane everyday. The audience is an intruding voyeur as Reichardt shows us a window into three lonely and belittled Montana women’s lives that aren't seen or heard by anyone else.