Nigel Floyd

In Review: The Master

by Nigel Floyd 15 November 2012

Paul Thomas Anderson, a film-maker whose organic film-making style relies more on responding to what he sees in the ‘dailies’ during filming than to any pre-existing narrative structure, has no idea how to end his stories.

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In Review: Skyfall

by Nigel Floyd 25 October 2012

“Where are we going?” Judi Dench’s M asks Daniel Craig’s Bond, as they drive towards their final meeting with destiny, one that involves a vengeful ghost from her past, and more familiar memories from his own. “Back in time.” replies agent 007 with characteristic terseness. In the year that marks the 50 th anniversary of [...]

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In Review: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

by Nigel Floyd 29 June 2012

For anyone new to the work of Spanish surrealist, satirist and Martini aficionado Luis Buñuel, his most accessible and successful film: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie provides the perfect introduction. This film won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1972, but in this re-mastered print feels as fresh as a daisy. [...]

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In Review: Cosmopolis

by Nigel Floyd 15 June 2012

Never one to shirk an artistic challenge, writer-director David Cronenberg has previously adapted for the screen two supposedly ‘unfilmable’ novels: William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and J. G. Ballard’s Crash. Here, he attempts to visualise Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, the majority of which takes place in the back of a sleek, white stretch limousine as [...]

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In Review: The Innkeepers

by Nigel Floyd 8 June 2012

Ti West is an indie writer-director-editor whose knowledgeable affection for the horror genre is easy to admire. On the other hand, he is also a journeyman film-maker about whom it is hard to get overly excited. This is partly because his old fashioned approach to supernatural scares relies on slow-burning subtleties rather than visceral excesses [...]

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In Review: Prometheus

by Nigel Floyd 1 June 2012

Stoked by publicity over-kill and panting fanboy scribblings, the slavering anticipation generated by Ridley Scott’s prequel to/re-boot of the Alien series reached stratospheric levels. No film, however extraordinary, could have hoped to match these over-inflated expectations. Now Prometheus is here, and all these blue-sky fantasies have crashed, Icarus-like, to Earth. There’s no denying that the [...]

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H. G. Wells’ The Island of Lost Souls on Blu-ray

by Nigel Floyd 25 May 2012

For all their visceral excesses or graphic depictions of torture, most modern horror films have lost the power to shock; much of what was unacceptable to twentieth century censors and audiences is now seen nightly at cinemas. By contrast, as horror expert Kim Newman points out in the beautifully illustrated booklet that accompanies this Eureka! [...]

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In Review: Men in Black III

by Nigel Floyd 24 May 2012

A decade on from Men in Black II, one of the worst sequels of all time, director Barry Sonnenfeld and Tropic Thunder co-writer Etan Cohen attempt to re-boot Will Smith’s stalled career and the secret-agents-versus-incognito-aliens franchise.

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In Review: Damsels in Distress

by Nigel Floyd 27 April 2012

It might seem odd that the 60-year-old director of Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco – should return after twelve years with a teen comedy set on a co-educational East Coast campus. However, the tendency of self-dramatising undergraduates to live their lives as if they are characters in one of their favourite novels [...]

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In Review: We Bought A Zoo

by Nigel Floyd 16 March 2012

Loosely based on Benjamin Mee’s book about his purchase of a dilapidated, failing Dartmoor zoo, this likeable comedy-drama is both an adult workplace movie and an old fashioned family film.

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In Review: Contraband

by Nigel Floyd 12 March 2012

This competent re-telling of an Icelandic heist movie was directed by Baltazar Kormákur, who both co-produced and played the lead role in Óskar Jónasson’s 2008 original, Reykjavik-Rotterdam. Like his father before him, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) was a legendary smuggler. Now he runs a home security business with his childhood friend, Sebastian (Ben Foster), and [...]

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