We were invited to attend Filmfest Hamburg’s bicentennial as guest of the “Come To Hamburg” initiative; a project set up to highlight the city’s hidden treasures through the writing of culture and travel bloggers from around the world. Normally, festivals are exclusive events, organised to create pre-release buzz or to Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Following In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, British director Martin McDonagh looks to be stamping his authority on awards season with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a blackly comic thriller about a mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter. Film titles can be lyrical, puzzling or purely literal. Three Billboards is Continue Reading
★★★★★ “They tell me you’re a brutal man,” a client says to Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, sporting full Mel Gibson beard and a similar shimmering sense of danger and incipient psychosis) and indeed he is. We first meet the lead character of Lynne Ramsay’s new film You Were Never Really Here as Continue Reading
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t hope to come close to.Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Continue Reading