Peterborough Arts Cinema

Potiche   

Catherine Denueve plays Suzanne Pujol, a "potiche", or trophy wife. Mme Pujol's household is wealthy but not super-rich. Her cantankerous and reactionary husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini) is the president of the factory Suzanne's father originally founded; his aggressive and insensitive management style has done nothing to cool a growing atmosphere of unrest.   more...

The Tree of Life   

Sean Penn plays a middle-aged executive evidently in the throes of a midlife breakdown, and he is mentally carried back in time to his boyhood in 1950s west Texas, where he and his brothers were dominated by an overbearing father, superbly played by Brad Pitt – a ferocious disciplinarian who abandoned his early vocation for music to become a failed businessman.   more...

Armadillo   

Armadillo faithfully records the routines of modern-day military deployment. There are long periods of downtime alleviated by macho sparring, pornography and computer shoot-'em-up games. Then there are futile attempts at engagement with the locals, who are understandably wary of providing assistance when they're literally caught in the crossfire.    more...

Attack the Block   

A recently qualified nurse (Jodie Whittaker) is being mugged by a racially mixed gang of hoodies on the way home to her south London tower block on Guy Fawkes’ night, when some creatures arrive from outer space. Very soon she's forced to make common cause with her teenage assailants as they battle to resist these dark furry balls of pure malevolence.    more...

Salt of Life   

In Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio was single and lived with Valeria; in The Salt of Life he is married, with a stroppy daughter, and paranoid that his increasingly erratic mother is blowing all the family money on expensive food and extravagant gift giving. (Indeed, the opening scene sees Gianni attempt to foist a power-of-attorney on her, but is too sappy to actually pull it off).    more...

13 Assassins   

The vicious Lord Naritsugu, a psychotic sadist threatening the stability of the realm, has to be destroyed, and only a team of dedicated samurai can achieve this. The elegant first half is dedicated to the selection and training of this elite group by the stately warrior Shinzaemon.    more...

A Separation   

The wife Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave the country with the couple's 11-year-old daughter. The husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) will not grant her the divorce or permission she needs, nor will the judge, who considers their case to be petty. Privately, they later agree to separate, their daughter Termeh remaining with the husband in their pleasant apartment in what we assume is an enlightened, middle-class quarter of Tehran.    more...

Troll Hunter   

This funny, scary, highly individual horror flick in the "found footage" style purports to be a documentary shot by a team of students investigating a series of strange killings in the Norwegian countryside. They stumble across a former naval commando, Hans (a brilliant, deadly serious performance by the comedian Otto Jespersen), who allows them to follow him around the country.   more...

Kill List   

Jay is an ex-soldier living in a comfortable suburban home with his wife, Shel, and seven-year-old son, Sam, who prefers playing at medieval knights rather than hearing bedtime stories about the ambushing of armoured cars in Baghdad. Jay and Gal (Michael Smiley), his former comrade-in-arms, stay at anonymous, ominously silent hotels beside motorways, meet a strange, unnamed client with a suitcase full of banknotes and embark on a series of murders in which the victims appear to welcome their fates as some form of retribution.    more...

The Guard   

Gleeson is on fine form as an unorthodox garda (special interests: class-A drugs, Russian literature, prostitutes, swimming, swearing) whose quiet corner of coastal Connemara becomes an international crime hotspot. Thus he is paired with urban FBI man Don Cheadle, who looks genuinely flummoxed by Gleeson's inappropriate outbursts. "I'm Irish. Racism is part of my culture," Gleeson protests.    more...

The Skin I Live In   

Antonio Banderas stars as Ledgard, a wealthy and brilliant plastic surgeon who in his palatial home, tastefully furnished and equipped with its own private operating theatre, is secretly experimenting on the beautiful and submissive young Vera (Elena Anaya), whose entire skin covering he is replacing with an eerily smooth artificial substance, transgenically derived from pig hide.    more...

Midnight in Paris   

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a youngish Hollywood screenwriter and would-be novelist best known for his skills at rewrites, a diffident, humorous man with a great respect for high culture and a love of popular art but deeply suspicious of pretension and academic condescension. He's visiting Paris with his egocentric social-climbing fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her wealthy, neo-xenophobic parents.    more...