Month: July 2016
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Odessa 2016: Illegitimate review
★★★★☆ Can time heal all wounds, or are certain indiscretions immune to the sympathetic ebb and flow of life? That’s the quandary posed in Illegitimate, the eye-catching incest drama from Romanian director Adrian Sitaru. Despite tackling one of society’s last remaining taboos, Illegitimate avoids sensationalism, presenting the topic of sibling incest in an earnest and…
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Odessa 2016: House of Others review
★★★★☆ If there was an award for best newcomer in world cinema then Georgia would be a great outside bet. In recent years, films like Rusudan Chkonia’s Keep Smiling, Levan Koguashvili’s Blind Dates and Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’ In Bloom have emerged from the Caucus region to resounding acclaim. Rusudan Glurdjidze’s haunting drama House of…
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Odessa 2016: Death by Death review
★★★☆☆ The fear of dying is the impetus behind Xavier Seron’s Death by Death, an Oedipal dramedy that positions itself between the two known truths of life and death. A bold and electrifying study of the dysfunctional relationship between a middle-aged hypochondriac and his dying mother, Seron’s feature-debut is an exceedingly dark, albeit frequently hilarious…
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VOD Review: River
★★☆☆☆ First-time filmmaker Jamie M. Dagg directs Rossif Sutherland in this Canadian crime-thriller as American volunteer and doctor John Lake, whose residency at a Laos hospital is cut short after disobeying his superior. He later encounters a sexual assault on a local beach and intervenes, which leads to staggering and life-altering consequences as he attempts to reach the Thai…
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VOD Review: A Patch of Fog
★★★☆☆ During one of A Patch of Fog‘s increasingly sinister exchanges between unhinged cat and desperate mouse, Stephen Graham’s devilishly dubious security guard, Robert, threatens his quarry with disconcerting rhetoric: “Am I a sad little man?” Though voiced by a veritable oddball, the sentiment could equally be applied to his prey, Sandy Duffy, a renowned…
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Film Review: Summertime
★★☆☆☆ Summertime is a well-made, well-acted French art-house flick that unfortunately doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Veteran director Catherine Corsini’s new film starts off as a promising and energising political thriller about the nascent feminist movement in post-1968 Paris, reminiscent of Olivier Assayas’ excellent Something in the Air. But then it inexplicably degenerates into…
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Film Review: Precious Cargo
★☆☆☆☆ During the end titles of Precious Cargo we get a close up of some dog muck. It would be nice to think this was a bit of meta-humour or a moment of candid self-awareness from first time director Max Adams, but unfortunately his risible, derivative heist movie has the audacity to actually think it’s…
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Film Review: The Hard Stop
★★★★☆ To open his new documentary The Hard Stop, George Amponsah uses a Martin Luther King quote that acts almost as a catalyst for what follows: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s with a view to providing the unheard with a voice that the filmmaker sought to understand the 2011 London riots…
