Film Eye is a magazine devoted to critically acclaimed films. Each issue showcases one film and is available in cinemas showing the film as well as online here.
Current and upcoming featured films are shown below. Follow the links next to each one for articles and information about that film including a review compiled with the leading critics' most incisive comments, profiles of the actors and director and a list of cinemas currently screening it.
A Dangerous Method
Issue number: 22A Dangerous Method is about the turbulent relationships between pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung (MICHAEL FASSBENDER), Sigmund Freud (VIGGO MORTENSEN) and a troubled young woman, Sabina Spielrein (KEIRA KNIGHTLEY), who comes between them. A fact-based costume drama, it marks a departure from the horror films for which director DAVID CRONENBERG is renowned. It is ‘elegant and absorbing… beautifully watchable and driven by a series of thoughtful and stylish performances’ (Mark Adams, Screen International). The film was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the actors have been nominated for various critics’ awards, including Mortensen for a Golden Globe.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Issue number: 21Martha Marcy May Marlene is about a young woman (played by Elizabeth Olsen) who flees a sinister cult based on a rundown farm in America's Catskill Mountains. Writer-director Sean Durkin’s feature debut, it won the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes in 2011. It’s ‘remarkably assured’ and Olsen is ‘a revelation’, said Wendy Ide, writing in The Times. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers concurred that Olsen is 'an actress of uncommon subtlety and feeling. It's a sensational performance in a gripping psychological thriller.'
The Descendants
Issue number: 20The Descendants is a gently bittersweet comedy drama from ALEXANDER PAYNE (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways). ‘Another blissful slice of Americana that confirms Payne as the finest chronicler of human foibles working in US movies,’ wrote Mike Goodridge in Screen International. ‘Both hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad, it’s a beautifully observed movie.’ Set inHawaii, it charts the fallout from a speedboat accident that has left a woman in a coma. GEORGE CLOONEY stars as the woman’s husband in what several critics have called his best ever performance. Clooney, Payne and the film itself are on most lists of Oscar favourites.
The Skin I Live In
Issue number: 19The Skin I Live In is a thriller and horror story, a modern-day Frankenstein tale, from maverick Spanish director PEDRO ALMODOVAR. Many thought this sublimely fashioned and compelling melodrama, which stars ANTONIO BANDERAS, should have won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The Daily Telegraph's David Gritten called it 'the work of a master near the top of his game' and Wendy Ide in The Times praised it as 'Almodóvar at his most obscenely entertaining and shamelessly exploitative’.
Beginners
Issue number: 18Beginners is all about fresh starts. EWAN McGREGOR is Oliver, whose father Hal (CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER) has just died. Oliver recalls how Hal came out as gay five years earlier at the age of 75, after the death of his wife of 45 years, and the film follows Oliver’s attempts to embrace love when it begins to blossom, just as his dad did. The romantic comedy label doesn’t do justice to this ‘deeply poignant’ (Peter Debruge, Variety) and ‘marvellously inventive’ film (David Edelstein, New York Magazine) which will ‘entrance sophisticated audiences’ (Allan Hunter, Screen International).
Never Let Me Go
Issue number: 17Never Let Me Go is a poignant love story set in an England that is at once familiar and subtly altered. It focuses on three children as they grow up and come to terms with both their feelings for each other and a sinister fate that awaits them. This is ‘British film at its very best', with ‘outstanding' performances (David Gritten, The Daily Telegraph) from CAREY MULLIGAN, ANDREW GARFIELD and KEIRA KNIGHTLEY. All three were nominated for British Independent Film Awards (with Carey Mulligan named Best Actress) and Evening Standard Film Awards. ‘This is a moving and provocative film that initially unsettles, then disturbs and finally haunts you' (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times).
Black Swan
Issue number: 16Black Swan is a dark psychological thriller about a dancer in a New York ballet company whose obsessive quest for perfection causes her to become dangerously unhinged. Fantasy and reality become intertwined in her mind as she becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, and she is tortured by paranoid hallucinations as the drama approaches its thunderous finale. ‘Alternately disturbing and exhilarating' (Mike Goodridge, Screen International), this is ‘bravura moviemaking' and many critics expect NATALIE PORTMAN to win an Oscar for her ‘searing' performance in the title role (Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent).
Somewhere
Issue number: 15Somewhere is writer-director SOFIA COPPOLA's affecting portrait of a jaded movie star, which won the Golden Lion, top prize at the Venice film festival, this year. It marks ‘an entrancing return to form' (Mark Adams, Screen International) for Coppola, whose acclaimed Lost in Translation (2003) won an Oscar for Best Screenplay as well as nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. Her depiction here of the absurdity and emptiness of life in the celebrity bubble ‘further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy' (Justin Chang, Variety). Grazia magazine called it ‘a must for fans of her absorbing, intimate style'.
The Kids Are All Right
Issue number: 14The Kids Are All Right is an astutely observed comedy drama about modern family life. ANNETTE BENING and JULIANNE MOORE have been widely tipped for Oscar nominations for their performances as a lesbian couple with two teenage children, both conceived from the same anonymous sperm donor. Their domestic set-up is disturbed when that sperm donor, played by MARK RUFFALO, unexpectedly enters their lives. This ‘wonderfully realistic film is both deeply affecting and riotously funny' (Sarah Cohen, Time Out) and is ‘an exceptional drama... the sort of pleasingly grown-up fare [that is] all too rare' (Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times).
