CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★☆☆☆ Earlier this year, Chilean director Sebastián Silva premiered two films at the Sundance Film Festival. The first, Crystal Fairy, was a slight and inconspicuous road movie through Silva’s native country, staring Michael Cera. The second, Magic Magic (also starring Cera, as well as Juno Temple and Emily Browning) depicted Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ A German western starring the inimitable actress Nina Hoss, Gold (2013) follows up its Berlinale premiere with a showing at Edinburgh. A tale of greed and migration, Thomas Arslan’s ambitious genre piece sadly fails to rise above a gentle canter in this bland and strangely pedestrian feature. An alluring Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Confounding audiences and critics alike at the Rome Film Festival, Sofia International Film Festival and now the 67th Edinburgh Film Festival, Silent Souls director Aleksei Fedorchenko’s beguiling and perplexing expedition into the myths and rituals of the Russian Mari – Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (Nebesnye zheny lugovykh Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Produced towards the end of the silent era, F.W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) was to be the legendary German director final film. A lyrical tragedy that imbues elements of factual and narrative filmmaking, Murnau’s exotic adventure is a poetic Polynesian love story that effortless Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Kaneto Shindô’s Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) receives the Blu-ray treatment this week thanks to the UK’s foremost purveyors of highly acclaimed filmic artefacts – Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. Presenting the intolerably difficult life of a peninsula-dwelling family, Naked Island is a cinematic ode to life separated Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan has explored a wealth of recurring motifs throughout his career thus far. These include repeated inspections of identity, performance and voyeurism amidst wider contexts such as familial anxiety and immigration. The first flex of his distinct voice can be found in his more than capable Continue Reading
★★★★☆ One of the breakout hits from the controversial blaxploitation era, Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown (1974) (alongside Coffy from the previous year) helped solidify the then 25-year-old Pam Grier’s reputation as the queen of that since mythologised sub-genre. Producing a new transfer which retains that grainy, tangible feel of the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Released into UK cinemas earlier this year around the announcement of former Pope Benedict’s XVI resignation, Alex Gibney’s hard-hitting Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) couldn’t have been more timely. An exactingly well-researched documentary, Gibney strikes the fine balance of creating a story that kindles Continue Reading