Wednesday 1 April 2015

Critical Week: Purging the underworld

Aside from films I saw as part of BFI Flare, I caught up this past week week with Keanu Reeves' latest career boost movie John Wick, a rippingly stylish revenge thriller that's far better than it has any right to be. Also enjoyable, but not quite as artistically ambitious, Fast & Furious 7 (aka Furious 7) is a thunderously entertaining step in the franchise, including a lot more emotion than these actors have attempted before. And they just about get away with it. The action stuntwork looked pretty cool on the Imax screen.

Further afield there was the superb Cliff Curtis in the dark and intense true story The Dark Horse; the astonishingly grim and unnerving Belgian thriller The Treatment, which compares chillingly with The Silence of the Lambs and Seven (yes it's that good); and the raucous documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, a mist-see for movie fans tracing the Hollywood career of Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who produced an outrageous run of films over about 15 years.

We now have two short weeks with the four-day Easter weekend in between. Film screenings on the schedule include Anna Kendrick in The Last Five Years, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, Jack Reynor in the Sundance-winner Glassland, the German thriller The Samurai, the comedy Undocumented Executive and the documentary Lambert & Stamp.

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