FEST – New Directors New Films Festival roundup
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right...
★★★★☆ Inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest is a darkly comic and moving fable about a wayward donkey living through fate’s tender mercies. EO is at once a cinematic curiosity, a compelling drama and a harrowing portrait of cruel whimsy.
★★★★☆ American director Darren Aronofsky has made a career out of exploring individuals who are physically and psychologically self-destructing in the throes of obsession. It could be the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle; building a boat to avoid a genocidal flood; ballet or wrestling; drugs or food.
★★★★★ Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s (We, La Permanence) first narrative feature Saint Omer is a major achievement and an investigation into motherhood, judgment and the other. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a university professor and writer who is working on a new book.
★★☆☆☆ After his girlfriend is killed in a brutal attack, former boxer and paramedic Jan (Milan Ondrík) falls into profound despair. Exploring themes of guilt, masculinity and justice, boxing-inflect crime film from Slovakian director Peter Bebjak shows much promise, but fails to coalesce into a coherent vision.
★★★☆☆ Bulgarian documentarian Andrey Paounov turns his hand to fiction in this adaptation of Yordan Radichkov’s 1974 play. January is an intriguing, eerie, ponderous narrative set entirely within the confines of a forest cabin. Religious allegories, monochrome photography and folk horror trappings ensue.
★★☆☆☆ Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans had all the ingredients to ascend as cinema’s new darling. Yet, as this semi-autobiographical film plods on, there is an unshakeable sense that in reaching for the stars, The Fabelmans instead lands somewhere more mediocre and disappointing.
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right...
★★★★★ Back in UK cinemas to mark a BFI retrospective of the French New Wave director, Agnès Varda’s acclaimed 1985 road movie Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire,...
★★★☆☆ Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was a masterclass in direction, cinematography, sound design and dramatic tension. This year’s sequel Sicario 2: Soldado, directed by Italian...
★★☆☆☆ The phrase “man’s best friend” is put firmly to the test in Patrick, a new British comedy from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie director...
★★★★★ Eight years on from Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik offers up Leave No Trace starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, an intricately crafted...
★★★☆☆ Jim Haynes is the focus of Meeting Jim, an unexpectedly captivating documentary by Ece Ger that’s been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature...
★★★★☆ After his best friend Esteban is devoured my a mysterious monster of the deep, the legendary undersea documentarian Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) vows...
★★★★☆ Very loosely based on the childhood of Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hung, Woo-Ping Yuen’s Iron Monkey is a terrifically entertaining action picture in...
★★★★☆ The Marvel Cinematic Universe may have the market hold, but Incredibles 2 – which arrives some fourteen years after the original – is...
★★★★☆ Matt Palmer’s debut feature Calibre is a tense, brutal thriller set in the rural Scottish Highlands. It boasts meaty performances from local talent...
When we think of the world’s most heroic movie protagonists, ranging from superheroes such as Superman and Iron Man, to the likes of The...
★★★★★ On 25 November 1970, Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s leading authors, attempted a coup d’etat with three members of his private army before...
★★★★☆ When a prisoner transport crashes during a night-time storm, John ‘Joker’ Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) make their escape, chained...
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy was, briefly, the hottest property in Hollywood. The star-studded cast of his 2001 Rat Pack remake delivered a film that was...