independent cinema
Joseph Walsh
Equally ambitious in scope as his 900min ode to cinema The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins’ latest work, Women Make Film, is a fourteen-hour exploration of the work of female film directors down the decades.Cousins’ Irish brogue no longer narrates the action, having replaced himself with the likes of Tilda Swinton (who also produces the film), Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore and Kerry Fox (at least in the first 20 chapters that this review covers). They, and Cousins, guide us on a self-described ‘road movie’, that shifts from clip to clip, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Rams before it, the ice-glazed hillsides and stark ochre grasslands of northern Iceland are the backdrop for Grímur Hákonarson’s third feature The County, a rural drama that explores the murkier side of local politics.Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) is a middle-aged, tough-as-nails dairy farmer. She’s grieving for her late husband who recently committed suicide, jack-knifing his truck into a ravine. We later discover he ended his life because of punishing debts owed to a corrupt cooperative that dominates the local farming community. This leaves Igna running the farm near Dalsmynni alone Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s fair to say that humanity’s relationship with nuclear energy over the last 50 years has had more highs and lows than a Spanish soap opera. From the Manhattan Project to Hinkley Point, it’s been a controversial technology that has promised both humanity’s salvation and damnation.Now, first-time director Vicki Lesley’s easy-going documentary explores the post-war history of nuclear power. Captured with an odd degree of lightness, she makes an otherwise heavy subject accessible. Lesley tells the history of the atom as if it were a romcom. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are swiftly brushed Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has made a career crafting perceptive and cerebral examinations of his native country. From his 2006 debut 12:08 to Bucharest to The Treasure, they were cerebral films that powerfully embodied the Romanian New Wave. With his latest film The Whistlers, Porumboiu shows he’s capable of being both a brilliant filmmaker and playful at the same time. It’s an impish noir thriller, full of femme fatales, crooked cops and sun-drenched islands. We begin on the island of La Gomera, the pearl of the Canary Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a lot of plucky British charm to Military Wives, from Peter Cattaneo, the director who won the nation's heart with his debut film The Full Monty over two decades ago. His latest offering, starring Kristen Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, has much in common with his first film - a rise-and-fall tale with plenty of comedy - but this time round features a predominantly female cast and is based on a true story.Many will remember the Military Wives Choir, who had a number one hit in 2011 with ‘Wherever You Are’. Cattaneo uses their story as a springboard for his own fictional Read more ...
Owen Richards
What’s the appeal of cinema? It can transport us to fantasy lands, or open our eyes to new perspectives. But one aspect that’s less discussed is how it brings people together. Going to the cinema is a social stimulus, a shared experience that sparks discussions and forges friendships. And as shown in Sudanese documentary Talking About Trees, its absence leaves a hole in the community.We follow the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), a collection of former filmmakers, as they try to reopen the Revolution Cinema in the city of Omdurman. It’s more than a hobby for them, it’s a calling. Since the military Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s debut feature, and the film must somehow reflect the parabola of the Israeli-born director's life: it’s set between Berlin and Jerusalem, the two cities apparently closest to him, and one of its main subjects – alongside weightier themes such as grief and loss – is food, especially the rich experience of cooking. (Graizer’s biography records how he studied film, as well as – a phrase you don't expect to find in such contexts – “trained in kitchens as a cook and will soon publish his own Middle Eastern cookbook”.) The result is independent cinema at Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh how British indies love a road trip. Trekking across the rugged landscape, meeting a colourful cast of characters, realising it’s not the destination but the journey. It takes something special to stand out from the pack. The Runaways, debut feature from Richard Heap, has that something special.Reith (Mark Addy, pictured below with Molly Windsor) and his three kids Angie, Ben and Polly run the donkey rides at Whitby beach. It’s a hardy life, cramped into a hut with a pittance to their name, but they have each other. This existence is turned on its head when Reith’s brother Bryce returns Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marketed as a couples-friendly romance, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night made a massive $37 million on its opening day in China but was subsequently denounced by irate viewers who felt they’d been conned into watching a neo-noir pastiche that bafflingly morphs into a journey into the hero’s unconscious mind. Films comprised of reality, dreams, fantasies, and memories are not for everyone. However, fans of directors Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nicolas Roeg, and Wong Kar-wai will likely find this art-house stunner an enrapturing experience.Bi’s follow-up to his impressive Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The acclaim of being the first to represent the mid-1980s AIDS pandemic in cultural form was a plaudit that none of those concerned would ever have wished for. With New York as its epicentre, and almost nothing known about the disease that was hitting at the heart of the city’s gay community, such early attempts were tentative, the boundaries between personal and political still rough. Strictly, theatre came first, with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart premiering in 1985.Dating from the same year, Arthur J Bressan Jr’s Buddies was certainly the screen pioneer, a piece of urgently made Read more ...
Tom Baily
Blue periods can lead to golden streaks. Such is almost the case with Honey Boy, which Shia LaBeouf wrote during a court-ordered stay in a rehab clinic for the treatment of PTSD symptoms. Based on LaBeouf’s upbringing and childhood acting years, the film focuses on the troubled relationship between Otis (Noah Jupe) and his dad James (Shia LaBeouf), switching occasionally to a young adult Otis (Lucas Hedges) undergoing rehabilitation.Director Alma Har’el turns LaBeouf’s script into an aesthetic vision of L.A. neorealism with a dab of the surreal. The main ingredients in the broth are dialogue Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) was the Australian New Wave film that most rigorously confronted the cataclysmic effect of British and Irish colonisation on the country’s Aboriginal people. It helped pave the way for such 21st century racial dramas as indigenous director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.Schepisi adapted it from Thomas Keneally’s 1972 novel, which looked beyond the Aboriginal genocide to the tragedy of attempted black assimilation in the whitefellas’ culture. Jimmie was based by Keneally on Jimmy Read more ...