Category: Film Reviews

The hip-hop community was given something to get excited about recently, with a debut trailer for an upcoming independent documentary by filmmaker Dean Huson. What's Real? A Hip Hop Documentary is the directors first feature length outing, and it's certainly an ambitious one. The film features introspective interviews and tour footage from a veritable crème de la crème of British and US underground artists, and is set to explore definitions of "real" in the eyes of a rabid hardcore audience.

Set in Northern England, across the racial divide, Love + Hate is a contemporary love story between a white guy and a Pakistani girl. Far from being just another Romeo + Juliet knock-off, though, Dominic Savage's film deals with the reality of cultural intolerance and double standards spawning from peer influence; and how they can hinder interracial relationships between young people living in our society today.

The "N" word is considered to be a touchy subject - particularly among black Americans - even today. Used in the derogatory sense to refer to black people, as well in eye dialect as "nigga" (an informal slang term), there is cause for debate whether its common use in the modern day is right or wrong.

You may yet be unappreciative of the art form of moving a vinyl record back and forth using various sophisticated techniques; or you may already be a great admirer and simply wish to know more about the historical development of scratching. Either way, Doug Pray's documentary, Scratch, fascinatingly emphasizes the importance of the Hip-Hop DJ and the turntable as a musical instrument, charting the rise of the unique subculture since its creation in the 1970s.

With urban youth culture proving to be an increasingly popular theme of exploration throughout the narrative of today’s British film and entertainment media, it’s inevitable that a tongue-in-cheek, more comedic approach would eventually seem a worthwhile endeavour for potential film distributors. Television’s already seen recent farcical attempts with such shows as, the moderately successful, Phone Shop on Channel 4, and BBC’s utterly deplorable Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show.

The second instalment of the much-hyped horror film follows the story of Katie’s [Featherston] sister Kristi [Grayden] and her experiences of demon harassment. Cue the home-shot video footage in the middle of the night to keep the audience squirming in their seats…

Vanilla Ice’s UK comeback is well under way, fresh from his turn at Glastonbury 2010, his first major feature film Cool As Ice finally gets a long-awaited UK DVD release thanks to Second Sight films.

The Hurt Locker opens our eyes to a realistic depiction of a bomb-disarming unit in Iraq. The explosive ordnance disposal team [EOD] is made up of Sergeant First Class William James [Renner], Sergeant J.T Sanborn [Mackie] and Specialist Owen Eldridge [Geraghty] whose job is to disarm the bombs that litter the streets. William is new to the team and has an unorthodox attitude to work, seemingly willing to risk his life unnecessarily to get the job done.

Scorsese and DiCaprio team up again in this hard boiled thriller where detectives Teddy Daniels [DiCaprio] and Chuck [Ruffalo] are led to the mysterious Shutter Island [which is home to the criminally insane] to find escaped patient Rachael Solando. But all is not as it seems when the staff and the patients seem reluctant to give any information to the detectives…

Here Ron Howard directs the second of Dan Brown's 'conspiracy' books, although this film is released after the Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons was actually published before Brown's more famous book.