film festivals
A Woman's Life review - simple but affectingFriday, 12 January 2018
A Woman’s Life first premiered at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival, alongside the likes of La La Land, Arrival and Jackie. Though it’s taken longer to get to our shores than its contemporaries, the film feels fresh and relevant. This... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Alice in the CitiesWednesday, 10 January 2018
“With that film I became a filmmaker,” Wim Wenders remembers in one of the extras accompanying this new release of his 1974 Alice in the Cities. More importantly, it’s the one that convinced him that he wanted to be one. His third film after... Read more... |
Best of 2017: FilmFriday, 29 December 2017
It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and... Read more... |
DVD: A Journey Through French CinemaTuesday, 12 December 2017
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to... Read more... |
DVD: The WorkSaturday, 02 December 2017
“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is... Read more... |
DVD: The Death of Louis XIVTuesday, 21 November 2017
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this... Read more... |
Heartstone review - huge visuals, close-up performancesSaturday, 18 November 2017
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Viennale: shunning the 'illusion machine'Tuesday, 07 November 2017
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times. For one thing, whatever sanity-altering toxin is affecting voters the world over... Read more... |
DVD: The OrnithologistTuesday, 07 November 2017
While bird-lovers will certainly not be disappointed by Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ new film, the ambitions of The Ornithologist stretch considerably beyond such avine fascinations. Its opening title, “Whoever approaches the Spirit will... Read more... |
Dina review - a poignant treatTuesday, 17 October 2017
Director Dan Sickles has known Dina her entire life. He knows her engaging personality, and he knows her tragic past. It’s the former which he and co-director Antonio Santini feel is worth celebrating in this Sundance award-winning documentary.Dina... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: A Man Called OveTuesday, 17 October 2017
It takes a while to get going, and doesn’t altogether evade sentimentality but overall this black comedy is hugely endearing. Rolf Lassgård (complete with bald cap) plays Ove. He's a depressed and resentful 60-year-old widower who can’t see any... Read more... |
Zoology review - the tale of a tailTuesday, 26 September 2017
Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s... Read more... |
