Berlin 2018: An Elephant Sitting Still review
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the...
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.
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the...
★★★★☆ It’s not difficult to guess which beast is being referred to in the title of Katharina Mückstein’s coming-of-age drama L’Animale. In rural Austria, Mati...
★★★★☆ The theme of institutional corruption has become recognised as a mainstay of the Romanian New Wave, but Ioana Uricaru’s debut Lemonade, the story...
★★★★☆ A veritable treasure trove for cinephiliacs, The Green Fog sees Guy Maddin and his Forbidden Room team use footage repurposed from movies and...
This year, for the very first time the Berlinale is offering a handpicked selection of films for special festival screenings online. This joint project...
★★☆☆☆ In the midst of the First Indochina War in Vietnam, a young woman, Linh (Kate Nhung), arrives at a French colonial rubber plantation...
★★★★☆ A remastered re-release of Soviet film director and artist Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, courtesy of specialist distributors Second Sight, is an...
★★★★☆ If you found out you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do? Cinema has often looked to stories of the dead...