Film Review: ‘Letters to Max’
★★★☆☆ How to solve a problem like Abkhazia? Or rather, how to send a letter from Paris to a country that has not yet...
★★★☆☆ 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.
★★★☆☆ How to solve a problem like Abkhazia? Or rather, how to send a letter from Paris to a country that has not yet...
★★★☆☆ The ironic naming of the cargo ship that director Lucie Borleteau uses in Fidelio: Alice’s Journey (2014) comes into view as the ‘Fidelio’...
★★☆☆☆ “John Clare was a minor nature poet, who went mad,” voices repeat as a challenging refrain throughout Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves (2015),...
Though he dislikes the term himself, Andrew Bujalski is widely regarded as the linchpin of the nebulous mumblecore scene that spawned the likes of...
★★☆☆☆ In a grey, rainy London, hued blue to add further sombre foreboding, the indomitable Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) finds himself in a familiar...
★★★★☆ French filmmaker Bruno Dumont is a director strongly associated with serious, spiritual, and metaphysical European arthouse. What a surprise it was, then, when...
★★★★★ Alongside Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, Otto Preminger was one of the most influential film noir directors in Hollywood in the...
★★★★★ Adapted from Gerald Kersh’s 1938 novel, which at the time warned readers that it featured a story “not for the strait-laced or squeamish,...
★★★★☆ Bruce Goodison’s impressive feature Leave to Remain (2013) confronts the issue of teenage asylum seekers struggling to adapt to life in London and...
★★☆☆☆ Belonging to that wonky sub-genre of William Shakespeare’s commonly works known as the ‘problem plays’, Michael Almereyda’s Anarchy (2014) is an intriguingly off-the-wall...