Review: Captain Phillips
Underhill, Vermont March 28th 2009. Captain Richard Phillips and his wife Andrea drive towards the airport surrounded by thousands of cars and trucks going about their daily business. Their...
Author: Mark Farnsworth
Senior Film Writer Mark Farnsworth teaches Film in East London and is currently working on two screenplays, The Mysteries and Fair Access. He also writes the Oh/Cult section for Brokenshark.co.uk.
Review: Dallas Buyers Club
Some films live in the head and some in the heart. “Dallas Buyers Club” does shuttle runs between the two. The head tells you that when a homophobic Texan asshole rides to the rescue of gay men...
Review: The Wolf of Wall Street
Jordan Belfort struts around his East Coast boiler room defiant. He’s a double-breasted Duce posing on the balcony, milking rapturous applause from his merry band of fucking idiots. “Stratton...
Review: 12 Years a Slave
Just look at Edwin Epps’ eyes. Shimmering blue hatred ringed with red and sunk into black pits dug out of his cheekbones. The sweat of corruption clings to his sickly yellow skin, he is odious and...
Review: American Hustle
“Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man - there's your diamond in the rough.” Larry David should know, that glint in his eye, a fortune in the bank, that...
Review – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Towards the end of their arduous journey to the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo and the Dwarves happen across the burnt out husk of Dale a prosperous town once inhabited by men. Smaug the Magnificent, the...
In Praise of: “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”
The Western is violence. The Western is death. “Death is the predominant element of the westerner’s world view, death of a certain kind, that is, death understood in a certain way,” states...
The mesmerising existential crisis of “Suzanne”
Have you ever imagined just how powerful your name is? Both with and without it you are everything and nothing. It can mask and reveal as much about your parents as it can about your own soul....
LFF 2013 Dispatch 3: The Sacrament, Good Ol’ Freda, New World, The Congress
Masquerading as a “Vice” magazine documentary, Ti West’s latest film, “The Sacrament” makes chilling use of immersionist journalism to reimagine the “Jonestown Massacre” as a...
London Film Festival 2013 Dispatch 2: Ida, Sixteen, Of Good Report, The Fear
Anna lives the simple life of a novitiate in a Polish convent. Her meals are plain; her days are silent like the snow that frames her tranquil existence. Orphaned in World War 2 Anna knows only god...