★★☆☆☆ Canadian auteur Bruce LaBruce opened the Venice Days sidebar of the Biennale’s 70th incarnation with Gerontophilia (2013), a romantic comedy (of sorts) following 18-year-old Lake (Pierre-Gabriel Lajoie), who finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with his girlfriend and at the same time attracted to older men. In order to further investigate Continue Reading
★★★★☆ This Park Circus rerelease of Otto Preminger’s 1958 classic Bonjour Tristesse, based on the Françoise Saigon novella and starring Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Jean Seberg, feels particularly timely. The frivolity of rich Europeans who party all night, drink champagne for breakfast and swap partners with the changing seasons Continue Reading
★★★★★ Shane Carruth, despite having made just two features, can already be labelled a divisive director. His latest think piece, Upstream Colour (2013), is a complex examination of the mutability of identity. Since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won the Special Jury Prize), it’s been both Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Directing duo Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado returned to Film4 FrightFest this year with Big Bad Wolves (2013), their follow-up to the darkly comic Rabies (2011). Once again blurring the lines between horror and political satire, this genre-savvy thriller examines the tenuous dichotomy between good and evil in a Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ If A Horrible Way to Die, the hallucinatory 2010 effort from Adam Wingard, was a genre riff on Antonioni’s Red Desert (1965), then his follow-up You’re Next (2013) plays like a horror rendition of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (1998) with its squirm-inducing family reunion. A more mainstream work than his Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ While numerous big-budget directors have been busy channelling the spirit of Michael Bay in the summer of 2013, the man himself has made his smallest film yet; and it turns out to be one of the strangest blockbusters in years. Pain & Gain (2013) is an open book; how Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Cinema loves coming-of-age stories. The examination of how adolescents navigate that period in their lives has and will always make for some excellent stories. After winning an Oscar for penning Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), Nat Faxon and Jim Rash have switched their focus from parents to teens for Continue Reading