Berlin 2015: ‘Queen of Earth’ review
★★★★☆ A chamber piece constructed in pallid pastel shades, Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (2015) marks a tonal if not thematic departure from...
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★★★★ Greek weird wave director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) hits his stride with his strangest yet most deeply satisfying comedy fable yet, Poor Things. This exhilarating mix of Fanny Hill and Frankenstein is adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name.
★★★★☆ A chamber piece constructed in pallid pastel shades, Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (2015) marks a tonal if not thematic departure from...
★★☆☆☆ Revered Bavarian director Werner Herzog strains to marry his eccentric directorial style with the period epic in this rather stolid and strangely formal...
★★★★☆ Arriving at the Berlinale with another probing examination into Chile’s harrowing past, The Pearl Button (2015) makes for a fitting diptych to Patricio...
★★★★☆ A festering beauty of a film slowly reveals itself in this bleak but uplifting black-and-white study of grief from Quebeçois director François Delisle,...
★★★★☆ Last year’s Stranger by the Lake (also distributed by Peccadillo Pictures) marked something of a sea change in the transitioning of LGBT cinema...
★★★☆☆ The feature debut of the most recent member of the Coppola clan to pick up a film camera, Gia (granddaughter of Francis), is...
★★★☆☆ Another year, another Young Adult book series optioned and adapted to spin into a trilogy (or more!) of action-packed and spectacular films. Based...