Based on the worldwide best-selling book series, romantic adventure FALLEN is coming to EST on April 24th before arriving on DVD and VOD platforms from May 1st courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. To celebrate, we’re giving away a Fallen DVD and book, plus a DVD bundle including Sing Street, Get a Job, LOL, and Nerve.

When Luce (Addison Timlin; That Awkward Moment, TV’s Californication) is sent to Sword & Cross reform school, accused of a crime she didn’t commit, she finds herself torn between two students: dangerous Cameron (Harrison Gilbertson; Need For Speed, Haunt) and mysterious Daniel (Jeremy Irvine; War Horse, Great Expectations). Tormented by strange visions, Luce begins to unravel the secrets of her past and finds she must choose where her feelings lie, pitting Heaven against Hell in an epic battle over true love.

Lauren Kate’s ‘Fallen’ series has repeatedly topped the New York Times Bestseller list since the first book was released in 2009 and has been published in more than 30 countries around the globe. The product of a truly global success story, FALLEN is the film the series’ legion of fans have been waiting for. Also starring Joely Richardson (TV’s Emerald City, Vampire Academy), FALLEN is a love letter to those fans and a love story for the ages.

For your chance to win a Fallen DVD and book bundle, answer the question below and fill in your details, then press submit! The competition closes on May 14th, 2017, so get answering and good luck. [Read more…]

Directed by: Margy Kinmouth
Running time: 83 minutes
Certificate: PG
Release date: April 3rd 2017

At the Royal Academy in London at the moment is a massive, stupendous show of Russian art covering the revolution from 1917 up to Stalin. It’s a fantastic, exciting, monumental show including paintings, sculpture and thrilling film clips of Eisenstein and Vertov, and walking around it for two hours is nowhere near enough – it’s simply too much to take in at one time.

That’s where Kinmouth’s film comes in. It’s a documentary looking at the whole period covered in the show, with additional restagings of the main events, and some really interesting interviews with some of the fantastic artists’ grandchildren, all of whom speak English very well and are intelligent and expressive. So why only three stars? Well, the run-through of the history of the period is a little like a history O Level lecture, and some of the narration is embarrassingly simplistic. However, it’s worth a watch, especially before a visit to the Royal Academy’s epic show.

When the Russian Revolution happened in 1917 it produced a new movement in art, to brush away all the old, imperialist stuff and bring in a completely new way of seeing the world. As Lenin knew, most of the population were illiterate, so he realised that posters, pictures and film would be far more effective in winning the fight of socialism and equality than books or leaflets. So he commissioned new art, and some, like Popova, Malevich and Rodchenko, produced some of the most thrilling new works of art of the 20th century. It was abstract, clean, even futuristic, and portrayed a Russian heading at speed into the future, with right on its side and equality in its veins. It also invented a new visual language, montage, and it is very notable how many women are depicted, shouting their way into history.

We all know what happened next, Lenin died, and Stalin took over, plunging the country into starvation and the purges, in which hundreds of people were shot every day. It was also a disaster for art, Stalin hated the new, and suddenly the artists were on the run, starving, tortured or killed. The art itself, as the RA show tells, became stultified, the dreaded “socialist realism” in which heroic workers are depicted flexing their muscles in the fight for production.

What is surprising about the doc is how little of the film footage is seen, after all the moving image is what films are all about, and this is a film. There are brief clips of Eisenstein’s October, depicting the storming of the Winter Palace, debunked by an academic as fiction, and a couple of clips of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, a reminder of just how trilling that film was when it was made, and still looks thrilling even now. Sadly that’s about it, maybe there was a rights problem.

Overall verdict: If you can’t get to the RA exhibition, or if you are planning on going and want to learn more about the Russian Revolution, this is a decent place to start. It has some great interviews, and does show the art in all of its glory, and sadness. What a world we might live in today if their experiment had actually worked.

Reviewer: Mike Martin