Aidan Quinn

07 May

Silence; Passengers; A Monster Calls and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

Martin Scorsese repays his fans’ faith with his most rewarding film in years – but Passengers is a slight tale of lust in spaceNeither cinemagoers nor awards voters made much noise about Silence (Studiocanal, 15), though that was to be expected. If Martin Scorsese’s long-cherished, serenely austere passion project had been an easy sell, it wouldn’t have taken him over a quarter of a century to develop. Two hours and 40 minutes of 17th-century Jesuit priests suffering for their faith in feudal Japan is a pitch itself designed to test the religiosity of Scorsese worshippers. The reward for those who…

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30 Apr

Casting JonBenet; Why Him?; I.T.; Diving Into the Unknown and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

Kitty Green’s study of the unsolved murder of the child beauty queen is a multilayered masterpiece – and clever Netflix have acquired itThe risk of repeating oneself too frequently in a weekly column is one to be carefully considered, though sometimes the vagaries of the release schedule make it unavoidable: for the second week running, a Netflix premiere handily trumps any new offerings on the DVD shelf. The streaming giant’s intelligent taste in documentary cinema has been known for some time now, but in grabbing Casting JonBenet straight from the festival circuit – it premiered in Sundance only three months…

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23 Apr

Tramps; Sand Castle; Madame Bovary; Salt and Fire and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

‘Straight to Netflix’ needn’t be a derogatory term – there are still gems to be found on the streaming platform“If a movie premieres on Netflix, is it still even a movie?” asked the American film critic David Ehrlich last week, stoking an ongoing, still-heated industry debate over the streaming giant’s handling of the new films it exclusively acquires, making them skip the cinema circuit entirely. For more tradition-bound cinephiles, “straight to Netflix” has the same stigma “straight to video” once did, though in the case of so-called Netflix Originals such as Adam Leon’s Tramps, it really shouldn’t.Leon turned heads at Cannes…

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16 Apr

Sully; The Birth of a Nation; Four Days in France and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

A lighter hand on the controls might have helped Clint Eastwood’s film about the Miracle on the Hudson, but Nate Parker’s account of a 19th-century slave rebellion is just a macho messClint Eastwood, like Woody Allen, is routinely praised for the near-clockwork regularity of his output: not every film’s a gem, but you can be sure another one’s coming down the pike. Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (Warner, 12), however, is one of those Eastwood films you wish he’d taken a little more time over. There are whispers of a deeper, sadder, more stirring psychological portrait in this study of…

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09 Apr

Rogue One; Swiss Army Man; The Pass; Frank & Lola and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

The force loses its lustre as Rogue One takes itself too seriously, while Daniel Radcliffe excels as a flatulent corpseMuch was made in advance of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 12) being a standalone film in the now 40-year-old space-hopping franchise, a narrative that tucks in snugly before the events of 1977’s series starter, but introduces fresh characters and objectives within a known world. It’s a good idea: studio money guzzlers wouldn’t dream of letting the whole thing lie, but the overt nostalgia mined by The Force Awakens isn’t a limitless resource. So why does Rogue One, for…

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02 Apr

Moana; Allied; Snowden; One More Time With Feeling and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

Disney’s uplifting Polynesian adventure is a cut above Robert Zemeckis’s silly wartime caper while Oliver Stone makes a hash of whistleblower Snowden’s storyThe profitable new recycling scheme that Disney has hit upon – remaking its own animated catalogue, minus the animation – is moving ahead so fast, one wonders how much time even their new cartoon efforts have got before getting expensively humanised. Perhaps a live-action Moana (Disney, PG) can be rustled up while its leading voice star, 16-year-old Auli’i Cravalho, is still suitably young. In the title role, her lively, lilting vocal presence is the most immediately winsome element…

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26 Mar

Paterson; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; The Edge of Seventeen and more – review

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn

Jim Jarmusch’s lovely Paterson looks for poetry in the everyday, while a Harry Potter spin-off is all style and no substanceLast week it was World Poetry Day, and if such randomly appointed occasions carried much meaning beyond a trending Twitter hashtag, I’d say it’s an apposite time to be releasing Paterson (Soda, 12) on DVD. Cinema has a patchy record of encapsulating other art forms, but something like a poet’s soul runs through Jim Jarmusch’s lovely, languid study of being. It’s not just in the elegant, surprisingly credible verse (courtesy of the venerable Ron Padgett) supposedly written by its protagonist,…

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14 Mar

Review: Elementary Season 1: TV Show

Max SchindlerUncategorizedAidan Quinn, cheap dvd, dvd, eBay, investigations, Jb Hifi, Joan Watson, Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Lui, New York, Sherlock Holmes

Elementary Season 1 - the modern day Sherlock Homes remake stars Jonny Lee Miller as detective Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson. Elementary is a drama about a crime-solving duo, Holmes and Watson that cracks the NYPD's most difficult cases. (more…)

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