Toronto 2015: ‘French Blood’ review
★★★★☆ As the name would suggest, Toronto’s Platform strand offers up-and-coming filmmakers a springboard from which to showcase their work on the world stage....
Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★★★☆ 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.
★★★★☆ As the name would suggest, Toronto’s Platform strand offers up-and-coming filmmakers a springboard from which to showcase their work on the world stage....
★★★★☆ With Maidan (2014), Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa made a stunning document of recent events, giving the sensation that history was being freshly minted...
★★★★☆ Casting a peculiar spell over its audience, The Wonders (2014) is a rural ghost story masquerading as a coming-of-age tale. Unfolding like a...
★★★★☆ Life in the twenty-first century is saturated with images. Our hourly or more likely by-the-minute interaction with screens presents us with a multitude...
★★★★☆ Opening with spectacular aerial shots of the labyrinthine Andalusian wetlands, where the raped and mutilated bodies of two local teenage girls are found,...
★★★★☆ Aleksei German’s epic Dark Ages sci-fi Hard to Be a God (2013) took over a decade to make its way onto DVD and...
★★★★☆ It’s been more than two decades since audiences last got to see a new film from visionary Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, with Frank...
★★★★☆ There was a shot in Joss Whedon’s box office behemoth Avengers Assemble (2012) which set fan’s tongues a-wagging when it popped up in...