Film Review: ‘Kidnapping Freddy Heineken’
★★☆☆☆ Take care to not place too much hope into the misery-inducing yet somehow star-studded caper Kidnapping Freddy Heineken (2015). It’s a head-scratcher of...
★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has a history of resilience, so it was hardly surprising to see it come back stronger than ever after two years of Covid restrictions. Founded in 1995, the festival is now the leading industry event in south-east Europe, showcasing the very best films from across the Balkan peninsula.
★★☆☆☆ Take care to not place too much hope into the misery-inducing yet somehow star-studded caper Kidnapping Freddy Heineken (2015). It’s a head-scratcher of...
★★★☆☆ There’s often an unfortunate tug-of-war going on beneath the surface of films made primarily with a social agenda in mind and by those...
★★★☆☆ Even for a Nazi, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a monumentally unattractive person. With his pencil neck, his weak watery eyes, his Touché Turtle...
★★★★☆ There’s a precipice that lies just out of frame throughout James Napier Robertson’s absorbing drama, The Dark Horse (2014). It represents different things...
★★★★★ Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi Blade Runner (1982) begins with a dazzling yet hellish vision of a metropolis shrouded in smog so thick that...
★★★☆☆ The central victory of Ron Mann’s fond portrait of the maverick American filmmaker Robert Altman is how personal he manages to make it....
★★★★☆ Upon its initial release in 1932, Raymond Bernard’s early-sound war film, Wooden Crosses was hailed as one of the masterpieces of cinema. Since...
★★★☆☆ Christopher Nolan continues to demand viewers to stretch their minds as well as their attention spans in his recent addition to an already...
★★★☆☆ John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), reissued this week for 50th anniversary celebrations, is at once a time capsule piece and an oddly prescient fable...
★★★☆☆ Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) is a ferociously dark, hilarious ride that doesn’t just mock the corruption and social injustices of modern day...