Reviews by johanlefourbe

For some rather obscure reasons, I have always been intrigued by this movie. Indeed, I remember it very well when it came out in 1996, the critics seemed to decent enough. Anyway, somehow, it took me about 16 years to finally watch the damned thing and, eventually, I thought it was not bad at all. First of all, it was featuring 4 promising actors at the time (Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich) but, eventually, none of them really ever managed to make it big after all. The movie itself was basically an interesting mix of teenage anxiety and witchcraft. However, even though the whole thing was rather spooky, it never became really scary but I guess it wasn't what they were trying to achieve here. Unfortunately, above all during the last 30 minutes, they competely lost their focus and it became a rather generic and boring fantastic horror flick. Still, there was some interesting stuff, especially Fairuza Balk who gave a very nice performance here and I wish I would see her more often as she seemed to be really talented. Anyway, to conclude, even though it was a rather flawed feature, it was still fairly entertaining and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

The war between the British government and the IRA was at the end of the 70's quite ruthless and this movie managed to display how far both sides would go to reach their goals. It was indeed a merciless movie which didn't take any side but neutrally displayed the facts. For a directing début, I thought it was pretty impressive. Indeed, you could see that McQueen was originally an artist as, in the midst of the horror and filfth, he managed to shot some visually beautiful scenes. During most of the duration, there was barely any dialogues, except for an outstanding scene between Michael Fassender and Liam Cunningham which lasted more than 15 minutes without any cuts. Indeed, it was not a movie about words and ideology, it was more a visual punch in your face. Obviously, Michael Fassbender gave her a star-making performance and he finally got his deserved breakthrough. Of course, when the hunger strike began, I was strongly reminded by 'The Machinist'. I don't know which one between Fassbender in this movie and Bale in 'The Machinist' looked more horrible but you definitely need a strong stomach to watch these flicks. Anyway, to conclude, it was not an easy movie to watch but I thought it was really impressive and it is definitely worth a look.

Since I have always been a huge of Roman Polanski’s work, of course, I had to watch his directing debut at some point. At the time, Polanski was not even 30 years old when he directed this first feature-length film and, surprisingly, it would be the only film he would make in Polish. Seriously, the guy was actually even younger than me! The thing I probably enjoyed the most about this movie was the fact that it was already displaying many of his trademarks that we will witness in his following masterpieces. I mean, sure, the story was rather generic but I really enjoyed the tone which was rather dark and bleak, unsettling and filled with sexual tension. As usual with Polanski, he gave here a rather pessimistic view of men in general, displaying our darkest corners which would be also something recurring in his work. On top of that, even though it was a directing debut, Polanski was back then already a cinematic master and the whole thing was quite spellbinding to watch. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, it remains a fascinating and rather well made thriller and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Roman Polanski's work.