CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★★★☆ Stephen Daldry‘s latest feature film, set among the garbage heaps of Rio de Janeiro, belongs to its youthful, non-professional cast. Trash (2014) opens with Jose Angelo (Wagner Moura) hurriedly packing. As he attempts to flee his apartment he is cornered by cops. Before his arrest, he throws a large Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The opening moments of Nick Broomfield’s Oscar long-listed documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014), call to mind the narrative inspiration for recent podcast, Serial. Pitching up in South Central L.A. in search of the story behind the eponymous serial killer, Broomfield is met with strident claims that the Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Julius Avery’s debut feature Son of a Gun (2014) starts promisingly in a maximum security prison where young JR (rising star Brenton Thwaites) has been sentenced to six months for some petty offence or another. The jail looks like a reformed and spruced-up version of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts…of the Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Winner of multiple awards on the 2013 festival circuit including the Golden Seashell in San Sebastian, Mariana Rondón’s Pelo Malo (2013) distorts your typical coming-of-ager about gender confusion into a well-observed Polaroid snapshot of contemporary anxieties in Venezuela, as well as the country’s deep social fissures economic and political Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Expectations and desires are not coming together very easily in Iram Haq’s feature-length debut film, I Am Yours (2013). It is Haq’s second outing as director and writer but continues on themes she has already presented in her short film Little Miss Eyeflap (2009): tradition, desire and responsibility for Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Comic book adaptations are fast becoming a staple element in the diet of blockbuster cinemagoers and, despite already owning Marvel, Disney have now decided to get in on the action themselves. Their first foray into the superhero universe comes in the eminently cuddly form of the inflatable robot Baymax Continue Reading
★★★★★ William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by the US novelist’s musing on the febrile relationship between memory, time and Continue Reading