Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ Diego Quemada-Díez’s debut film The Golden Dream (2013) so impressed at Cannes in 2013 that it received a special award and fulsome praise from Ken Loach. It tells the simple and familiar story of three young Guatemalans who decide to leave their homeland and travel through Mexico towards the ‘dream’ of the […]
★★★☆☆ Vivian Maier was a ghost, a recluse, an enigma, a mystery, and quite possibly one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century. And, in truth, despite the intentions of John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, she is no closer to being found than she ever was. Maloof and Siskel’s documentary Finding […]
★★★☆☆ When six world renowned filmmakers – including Robert Redford and the late Austrian director Michael Glawogger – were asked to make short films for a television series about pioneering buildings of cultural influence, the results were never going to be boring. Cathedrals of Culture’s (2014) six 30-minute segments – gathered here as […]
★★★★★ Lars von Trier’s masterpiece is almost twenty. Starring Emily Watson, in what surely ranks as one of the most remarkable big screen debuts, Breaking the Waves (1996), like most classics, appears to have imprinted into its fabric an essential and resolute splendour. Despite premièring nearly two decades ago the film’s mixture of […]
★★☆☆☆ Has modern commercial pop stripped music of its capacity to inspire individuality or can, given the appropriate ingredients, a song tap into the transformative qualities of the art form and truly save your life? Such questions are posed in Begin Again (2013), the latest feature from John Carney, who here transcends his […]