Leo BartonMar 11, 20183 min readCoco: Watching Films Intended for Another Audience.About a third into Coco and I find myself watching closely, but bored. The story and sleek but fantastical animation, like most Pixar...
Leo BartonMar 3, 20184 min readUntitled: Who is the Author of a Dead Man’s Film?Countless artworks will never reach our senses, given up on, unreleased or unfinished in the creator’s time. Once discovered should we...
Leo BartonFeb 24, 20184 min readWe Already Know What We're Watching: Expectation and CinemaWhen is the last time you watched a film without any expectation? You’d never heard the title, knew nothing of who was in it or made it,...
Leo BartonFeb 19, 20186 min readCan the Cinema be a Safe-Space for Discrimination? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Living in the 21st century, we are very used to satirical humour playing on a line between political correctness and offensive. Satire by...
Leo BartonFeb 11, 20183 min readIchi the Killer: Expectation via Reputation Takashi Miike controls us in exactly the way Kakihara controls his victims throughout their brutal torture and slaughter. We are...
Leo BartonFeb 4, 20183 min readYi yi: A One and a Two: Long Periods with CharactersThirty minutes in and I find myself slightly alienated by Yi yi—not sure whether it was simply my mood, the film’s opening or the...
Leo BartonJan 28, 20183 min readThe Housemaid (1960/2010): The right to be called a remake.Comparing Kim Kiyoung and Im Sangsoo’s films of the same title is no easy feat, even though many sources will tell you that Im’s film is...
Leo BartonJan 21, 20184 min readDarkest Hour: What’s in a Face?Winston Churchill holds an iconic visage immediately recognisable to any and all Brits, regardless of generation. Thus it is...
Leo BartonJan 14, 20183 min readStoker: Reinventing the ‘Mistake’Fragmented images linger in the corners of frames, characters are framed with vast headroom, inserts of fractions of seconds only showing...
Leo BartonJan 6, 20184 min readWill the Rise of Netflix Benefit the Art House Market?Spending this year abroad and the last two years in little Southampton I have found it extremely difficult to find cinema venues that...
Leo BartonDec 30, 20173 min readMurder on the Orient Express: Classics, Stars and leaving the audience out of the mystery.As I had a number of hours to kill before my night-bus from Tokyo to Kyoto I decided to give Murder on the Orient Express a...
Thinc FilmDec 25, 20174 min readTati's Monsieur Hulot - A Malfunctioning Man(?)French legend Jacques Tati both saw success and failure from his ingenious concoction of Monsieur Hulot that eventually completely...
Leo BartonDec 23, 20173 min readThe Importance of Restriction: The Seeds of Violence The Seeds of Violence’s (2017) primary achievement is it’s phenomenal devotion to its style. It utilises an extreme form of cinematic...
Leo BartonDec 16, 20173 min readMother!: To See but Never TouchDarren Aronofsky’s latest film continues in the footsteps of much of his career whereby he takes a select set of emotions and introduces...
Thinc FilmDec 2, 20172 min readRethinking the Rating SystemWhat information do we really get from a rating system, be it out of five, ten or one hundred? To many it’s simply a measure of whether...
