dir. Park Chan-wook (2003) S. Korea   Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) does not know why he was locked up for fifteen-years. Nor does he know why he was released again. Going into a sushi bar, he asks the chef for “something living.” Yet this scene, in which he eats an octopus and collapses with its tentacles...

dir. Steve McQueen (2011) UK/USA   Just as Bobby Sands drew his last breath in Steve McQueen’s exquisite cinematic debut, Hunger, so each sharp intake in the British writer/director’s handsomely produced follow-up accentuates life’s brittleness. Synoptically, Shame is a film that attempts to penetrate the psyche of a thirty-something satyromaniac named Brandon (Michael Fassbender) –...

dir. Terrence Malick (1973) USA   Terrence Malick is one of the most prestigious members of the generation of American filmmakers commonly known as the Hollywood Renaissance. With a strong interest in visual cinema that recalls the aestheticism of Hollywood’s golden-age directors, particularly John Ford, Malick’s work is characterised by an innate fascination with symmetrical...

dir. Mathieu Kassovitz (1995) France. From Tahrir Square to Wall Street, via Tottenham Hale and the Northern Quarter, 2011 has been a year defined by demonstration. Acknowledging this, and in response to Time Magazine’s naming ‘The Protestor’ as its Person of the Year, my attention was drawn, inexorably, to La Haine: Mathieu Kassovitz’s powerful, timely...

dir. Marc Singer (2000) UK/USA.   In 1994, British expatriate Marc Singer met John Murphy – a homeless man on the streets of New York. “He would always talk about the tunnels under the city”, recalls Singer. “He told me that, in the tunnels, you could build yourself a house and have electricity. He heard...