The 63rd Berlin Film Festival drew to a close last night with its prestigious annual awards ceremony, rewarding the cream of this year’s crop with the International Jury’s highest accolades. Headed up by The Grandmaster director Wong Kar-wai, and featuring American actor Tim Robbins and acclaimed Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ From visionary director Reha Erdem (Times and Winds, Kosmos) comes Jîn (2013), an environmental parable that uses the bitter Turkish-Kurdish conflict as a universal metaphor for the destructive disposition of humanity upon a frail and delicate natural world. Narratively influenced by the tender storytelling of fairy tales, Jîn feels Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Sebastian Fritzsch’s End of Time (Endzeit, 2013) is a snapshot of a post-apocalyptic world, fashioned against the same deeply meditative backdrop of 1980s Soviet sci-fi. Yet, despite its melancholic methodology, this languid drama lacks the reflective, sociopolitical punch the sub-genre is renowned for embracing. A brief hand-drawn, stop-motion exposition Continue Reading
★★★★★ Despite the tumultuous Greek economy, the country’s cinema has been going through something of a renaissance of late, with directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari fashioning their own surrealist catacomb of absurdity. Elina Psikou’s The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (I aionia epistrofi tou Antoni Paraskeva, 2013) continues Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Founded in 2003 by “a couple of guys in a [internet] chatroom,” peer-to-peer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was responsible for co-ordinating half of the world’s bit-torrent traffic by 2009. With an estimated 22-25 million users downloading from the site at any one time, TPB is clearly a principal Continue Reading
