Phil Jeng Kane

THE HANGOVER (2009) was a world-wide phenom’ wherein director Todd Phillips took the crudity and fratboy energy of his films OLD SCHOOL and ROAD TRIP genetically modified the ingredients in a Thermomix, sprinkled pixie dust on the concoction and produced a new movie with box office approaching $500 million. People loved THE HANGOVER. Film hipsters who hate everything thought it was funny. Your unc...

In New York City, Victor (Farrell) a crime lord’s right-hand man, is seduced by Beatrice (Rapace), a woman seeking retribution. Victor and Beatrice live in crummy high-rise apartments. She can see into his place and he can see into hers. Victor sees Beatrice watching him. He is a cautious man and is disturbed by this strange intense woman. The criminal gang he is part of is under scrutiny an...

The story of an eleven-year-old diabetic girl nicknamed Skunk (Eloise Laurence). She lives with her father Archie (Tim Roth), her elder brother Jed (Bill Milner), and au pair Kasia (Zana Marjanovic) in North London. Her life changes after witnessing a violent attack on a neighbour in the cul-de-sac where she lives. BROKEN is a first feature from director Rufus Norris. It is written by Mark O’Rowe ...

French writer-director Lorraine Levy’s new feature THE OTHER SON (Le fils de L’autre) is a melodrama that seeks to investigate the human stories that lie beneath the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The premise is old indeed. Babies are accidentally switched at birth and each grows up living the life intended for the other. The consequences of this mix-up are particularly devastating  given the...

A former Weather Underground activist goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity. Robert Redford plays the former activist Nick Sloan, now a civil rights lawyer called Jim Grant living in upstate New York. He has been hidden in plain sight for thirty years. When a former activist colleague, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), who has also been in hiding, is arrested by the FBI, ...

Nicholas Hoult is R, a young man facing the existential crisis that comes with being a zombie. Grunting his way through a post-apocalyptic America with the mindless hunger of the undead, R has no memories, but he has dreams and his inner life is full of wonder and longing for the time that must have gone before. WARM BODIES is an obvious creative conceit for a genre over-stuffed with variations. I...

Mild-mannered businessman Sandy Patterson (Bateman) travels from Denver to Miami to confront the deceptively harmless-looking woman Diana (McCarthy) who has been living it up after stealing Sandy’s identity. Seth Gordon’s IDENTITY THIEF is a comedy with a very familiar feel. In this post-Hangover, post-Apatow movie world that we live in, we the audience, expect a certain level of bad behavio...

Portraying history is difficult. Documentarians are often accused of misrepresenting history with a biased retelling of the facts. However, when playwrights and filmmakers take a historical event and turn it into a speculative drama, then calling that history is as accurate as calling an egg slicer a banjo. HYDE PARK ON HUDSON is a banjo. Or perhaps it’s an egg slicer. I may have lost control of t...

A story in which good triumphs over evil is a standard movie narrative. We want a villain to get his comeuppance. We need to see the bad punished for their misdeeds. This is what we want from Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God. What we get instead is more complex and nuanced. Alex Gibney’s feature documentary tells a harrowing tale of the clerical sexual abuse of children. It seems easy...

People like magic. Some people. I hate magic because I have no soul. I also don’t enjoy the singing of Julie Andrews for the same reason. (Sound of Music fans please leave your insults in the comments box below.) THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE is about maintaining one’s child-like joy in the art of illusion. I wish I could say it was otherwise, but AccessReel insists that I review the movie I saw...

A new documentary exploring the story of the West Memphis Three, a reference to the three teens (Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley) who were convicted of murdering 8-year-old boys Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. This is the story behind the fight to bring the truth to light. What happened to the West Memphis Three is both fasci...

Come with me to the 1970s, folks. Back to the hard justice of UK crime telly. Back to a time when The Professionals protected Britain from threats internal and external and when The Sweeney went after London’s toughest criminals.  Let us return to an era when Martin Shaw, Lewis Collins, John Thaw and Dennis Waterman played hard-bitten law enforcers who chased villains in their Ford Consuls, Granad...