Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ Novelist turned filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki excelled at crafting an atmosphere of the otherworldly on the screen. Though 1965’s Jump may be more widely known and highly regarded, a similar milieu pervades The Last Day of Summer (1958), Konwici’s first […]
★★★★☆ There’s a moment of cinematic perfection around forty minutes into Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Austeria (1981). It’s an instant of the kind of visual poetry that enlivens the medium in the viewer’s mind and reminds us of the simple potency that […]
★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended and the entire country went through a process of comparable liberalisation that naturally extended to the […]
★★★☆☆ A black dog lopes through an apparently empty camp amidst a lifeless landscape. This eerie intro to Clément Cogitore’s fascinatingly spooky The Wakhan Front (2015) recalls a dustier, low-key version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Playing in the […]
★★★☆☆ Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu won the Un Certain Regard prize back in 2009 with his black comedy Police, Adjective. This year he entered the competition and picked up the Un Certain Talent prize with The Treasure (2015), a similarly […]
★★★★☆ A story of filial rivalry in a remote valley in Iceland, Grímur Hákonarson’s second narrative feature Rams (Hrútar, 2015) begins as an oddball comedy about sheep farming and grows slowly into a tale of elemental and moving power, deservingly […]
The results are in. The closing ceremony of the 68th edition of the Cannes film festival began more like the Oscars than the glamorous, abrupt ceremonies of old; with John C. Reilly scat-singing and a sense of anticipation with a […]
★★★☆☆ Following the impressive The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), the excellent A Prophet (2010) and the melodramatic Rust and Bone (2012), Jacques Audiard returns to Cannes with Dheepan (2015), a mix of Loachian social realism and Death Wish-style […]
★★★☆☆ A drama about a dignified man struggling to make ends meet minus the usual tragedy, histrionics and melodrama, Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché, 2015) provides an insight into the life of a working-class […]
