Features

Love hotels are short-stay hotels providing couples-husband and wife/client and prostitute/singleton and friend-with an intimate setting to explore all matters of sexual activities and fantasies. The scale of comfort and quality stretches from utilitarian sleep boxes to personal quirky, thematic amusement arcades equipped with fancy lighting, disco balls and karaoke machines. Although love hotels appear all over the world, their history in Japan goes back around four centuries. Love Hotel (…)

Tony Hickson’s reviews The Expendables 3 poster

Beauty Is is a 2-hour documentary about the attitudes and opinions of Black British women and men on the meaning of Black beauty. For women. The film argues that complex processes of internalised racism and alienation have arisen as a result of the media, cosmetic, health and fashion industries which idolise the white Barbie doll and are intent on helping Black women to become more like her. Beauty Is sets about unpacking the struggles for Black women that result from the social pressures to (…)

Tony Hickson’s latest review of a film poster

Although I was planning to see Double Play, a potentially interesting documentary about the friendship between film directors Richard Linklater and James Benning, the former a long-standing darling of American semi-indie who flirts with Hollywood (The School of Rock), the other a firm outsider of the mainstream who makes feature length, non-narrative landscape films, it was cancelled. So instead I went to watch Linklater’s latest film Boyhood, and with the spectre of Double Play looming (…)

’American Idol’ owes me, big time. Whilst they didn’t clip my wings during an audition by highlighting my average singing talent, their on-screen auditions showcasing amazing, (allegedly) undiscovered vocal talent has served to divert my attention from the lives of amazing, discovered vocal talent that still has not ’made it’. ’20 Feet from Stardom’ is a documentary profiling background singers, covering the last 50 years and reminding us that talent is one thing many aspiring singers are (…)

’The Invisible War’ is less about a secret war that rape victims are fighting in the military than a series of public and private battles to fix a broken system. Well, broken for the victims of rape, not so much for the rapists who remain invisible to the criminal justice system. Audiences will readily identify the usual drill that plays out when rape is reported: What were you wearing? What were you doing? But in the context of the US military other interesting questions are raised, such (…)

David Mackenzie’s new film is a much-welcome addition to the British prison drama genre, that weaves sophisticated narrative into a bold critique of the penal system and a mockery of rehabilitation inside. Set in the microcosm of an English prison, Starred Up is the story of serial offender, 19-year-old Eric Love (Jack O’Connell), who has left the relative comfort of foster homes and juvie, to join inmates, including his estranged father Neville, (Ben Mendelson), in an adult prison. The (…)

For the most part Tim’s Vermeer is a film about vision, about how we literally see the world- the limitations of sight and its augmentation through technological means. It’s also a film about how we see the world in the figurative sense; Tim Jenison, a 21st century computer software inventor (whom I would comfortably place in the top 1% or thereabouts) sees it, affectionately, as his playground. The film takes as its premise the idea that Tim and 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (…)

’Noah’ is certainly appropriately titled. This isn’t a big screen portrayal of one of the great biblical stories of Noah and the Ark. It’s a story about a group of white Europeans/Americans/New Zealanders with accents that have no connection to the Middle East where the Biblical story takes place (beyond the names they didn’t even try!!). Given that the Ark wasn’t mentioned in the title, and my knowledge of the actors who were cast in leading roles, I should’ve taken these clues that this (…)