NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying review
★★☆☆☆ Richard Linklater aficionados will be familiar with the director’s unique ability to conjure up cinematic poetry from a set of trademarked ingredients: actors...
★★★★☆ Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six years, R.M.N. is a multi-faceted, oft-bleak, and occasionally surreal portrait of racism and toxic masculinity in Romanian society. In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
★★★★★ Childhood friends Na-Young (Greta Lee) and Hae-Sung’s (Yoo Teo) young lives are irrevocably changed when Na-Young’s family emigrate from South Korea to Canada, until the pair reconnect twelve years later. Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song.
★★☆☆☆ Richard Linklater aficionados will be familiar with the director’s unique ability to conjure up cinematic poetry from a set of trademarked ingredients: actors...
★★★★☆ A young chef tries to booze and bang the pain away in director Peter Mackie Burns’ engaging, charming comic drama Daphne. Set in...
★★★★☆ Midi Z’s The Road to Mandalay lacks any of the exotic longing or Orientalism implied by the Kipling poem it derives its name...
★★★☆☆ Set in the unforgiving American West at the end of the 19th century, Brimstone – the first English language film written and directed...
★★★★★ Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women tells three stories of female malcontent in Montana, one of the least populous states in the United States. Connected...
★★☆☆☆ Following on from her stylish and well-received debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, American-Iranian Ana Lily Amirpour returns with The Bad...
★★★★☆ The anguished gaze and furious composure of bereaved sibling Yance Ford makes his film, Strong Island, a deeply personal essay on grief. Two...
★★★★☆ An older man and a younger woman accidentally discover that, every night, they encounter each other in their dreams as a pair of...