Film reviews and more
★★★★★ Can violence be contained through ritual? Does sanctioning violence in specific contexts purge the need for its spontaneous outburst? In his seventh feature, Indian director Lijo Jose Pellissery explores the nature of savagery in this singular, heaving howl of a film. Not dissimilar from the Spanish running of the bulls, Jallikattu is the Indian practice of releasing a […]
★★★★☆ Marking the 25th anniversary of diplomacy between Japan and Uzbekistan, Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest is a freewheeling comedy of cultural errors. With J-popstar Atsuko Maeda in the lead as bored TV reporter Yoko, To the Ends of the Earth is a light, airy and fun journey with flashes of poetry. Shooting on location in Uzbekistan for a bland […]
★★★★★ Waad al-Kateab was a student at the University of Aleppo as the first anti-Assad demonstrations broke out in her city. As the protests grow and the uprising is met with increasing violence from Government forces, al-Kateab documents her involvement in the city under siege, filming her marriage to medical student Hamza and the birth of her daughter, Sama. […]
★★★★☆ For his fifth feature, Knives Out, American director Rian Johnson returns to the smaller-scale crime fiction that made his name. The result is an impeccably-staged, gripping murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie. Harlan Thrombey (Christophe Plummer) is dead, by his own hand it seems. But as we know, things are rarely that simple. Enter Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a […]