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'Particle Waves' by Kian-Peng Ong at arebyte Gallery, 13th March 2014
290 miles northwest of San Francisco, way out in the California desert lies The Hat Creek Radio Observatory. Across the scrub, among the tumbling tumbleweeds sit 42 radio telescopes, their huge faces...
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'Starred Up' (2014) directed by David McKenzie
Prison is a fascinating place in cinema. Good directors use it as a microcosm - a hermetically sealed bottle where frustrations, resentments and violence that bubble under the society's surface come...
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'Back to the Garden' (2013) directed by Jon Sanders
Back to the Garden is a serious test of cinematic patience with scant reward at the end. This micro-budget drama is so austere and so deliberately paced that Sanders seems to be daring his audience to...
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FEMME:SKIN at the Stratford Circus, 20th March 2014
Forget Bunker Hill, Waterloo and Hastings: the important battles these days take place in the amorphous land of ideology. This is a war between old gods and the modern world and one of the fiercest...
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'Muppets Most Wanted' (2014) directed by James Bobin
Pixar spent years wrestling with millions of polygons and complex shaders to get their characters to emote believably. Jim Henson did it with some felt and a ping pong. In a digital era the Muppets are...
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) directed by Anthony & Joe Russo
When Iron Man was released in 2008 it was a shot across the bows of the superhero genre. A combination of great dialogue, brilliant casting and slick pop-inflected direction added up to a film that,...
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'Calvary' (2014) directed by John Michael McDonagh
Two Irish Catholic priests live together in an isolated Irish village. One of them has a cosmopolitan attitude to life that's at odds with the rural environment he finds himself in, the other is dull...
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'Noah' (2014) directed by Darren Aronofsky
Noah is completely bonkers in the best possible way. The Biblical epic has fallen out of fashion in mainstream cinema and, buoyed by a love of The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, Aronofsky is determined...
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Divergent (2014) directed by Neil Burger
What if the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter took over the world? This is essentially the unlikely premise of the plodding charm-free Divergent. Set after some undefined calamity it's been decided by...
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Event: Tribute Screening of 'Daisies' by Věra Chytilová on Sunday 13th April
On 12th March 2014 the finest woman to emerge from the short-lived 1960s Czech New Wave of Cinema died. Věra Chytilová wasn't a name tripping off the tongues of those that throng through the doors of...
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'We Are the Best!' (Vi är bäst!) (2013) directed by Lukas Moodysson
Everybody sells out in the end. Punk is kicking back against the morosely safe, taking a good hard look at the craggy-faced suits meandering down the streets, the alcoholic absent parents, the lying...
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'Locke' (2013) directed by Steven Knight
The prospect of spending an entire film trapped inside a car with a miserable builder as he drives from Birmingham to Croydon isn't exactly the most tantalising of propositions. But that's what Locke...
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'The Raid 2' (2014) directed by Gareth Evans
The Raid was a fat-free film that hit the ground running and didn't look back. A cop is stuck in a building with a bunch of gangsters and has to beat them all up to escape. The efficient brutality was...
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Cabaret Roulette: 'Guilty Pleasures' at Madame JoJos, 9th April 2014
I like Soho. I like the piss-addled alleys. I like the bitchy queens hanging around outside the Admiral Duncan. I like Gosh! Comics. I like the neon soaked sex shops. I like Maoz Falafel. And I...
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'The Amazing Spider-Man 2' (2014) directed by Marc Webb
Just when I thought I was sick of superhero movies... I'd figured The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was going to be another in an endless parade of identikit blockbusters by numbers. All the signs were there;...
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Pat Dam Smyth at St Pancras Old Church, 11th April 2014
The dead of Old St Pancras are restless. Hundreds of years ago they laid their heads down for the last time. Or so they thought. Then along came tomorrow, it made demands for space, efficiency and...
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'In This House: A Family Breakdown' at the Space Arts Centre, 12th April 2014
Going to see a play about a murder trial is a bit of a busman's holiday for me. I've spent an inordinate amount of time in courtrooms up and down the country watching murderers balefully staring from...
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'Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs' at the Tate Modern, 18th April 2014
Uh-oh. I don't get it. This dawns on me as I stand in a sea of carefully bearded and expensively handbagged Tate Modern visitors, smack dab in the middle of one of the most critically acclaimed...
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Looking for Light: Jane Bown (2014) directed by Luke Dodd & Michael White
Looking for Light is a confident and modest documentary structured with intelligence and close attention to detail. This buttoned-down precision matches the temperament of its subject: legendary...
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After the Night (Até Ver a Luz) (2014) directed by Basil de Cunha
After the Night, a 95 minute gangland adventure from a first-time director, initially feels like a promising proposition. This is usually a recipe for lean, muscular cinema; low budget film-making with...
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