Cinema in the Time of Corona: Watching the latest releases at home
With cinemas closed, major releases postponed, and current productions in limbo, this is a dark time for filmmaking. It’s horrible to imagine that after...
★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
With cinemas closed, major releases postponed, and current productions in limbo, this is a dark time for filmmaking. It’s horrible to imagine that after...
★★★★☆ After his wife drowns in a tragic accident, Juha (Pekka Strang) enters a lengthy bout of depression, unable to connect with either his...
★★★★☆ It’s easy to think that our lives have become bottle episodes in recent weeks: single location stories cut off from the grand narrative...
★★★★☆ System Crasher is the outstanding feature film debut of German director Nora Fingscheidt. A tremendous slice of life filled with light and energy, which...
★★★☆☆ The opening film of this year’s digitised CPH:DOX festival, Kenneth Sorento’s The Fight for Greenland offers a balanced, clear-eyed view of an indigenous populace grappling with the prospect of autonomy from the Kingdom of Denmark.
Hollywood certainly knows how to churn out a blockbuster or three. There are now nearly 50 movies that have generated over a billion dollars...
★★★☆☆ Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) is an ageing star of French cinema. Her self-aggrandising memoirs have just been published and her screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette...
★★☆☆☆ On paper the story of Marie Curie, a pioneering woman of science, seems like prime awards bait: with a big central role for...
★★★★★ It’s 1989 and convicted arsonist Amador (Amador Arias) has just been released from prison after setting forest fires in the Spanish countryside. Returning...
With the Cannes Film Festival now postponing its 2020 edition in light of the global Covid-19 epidemic until late June at the earliest, and other major fests either cancelling or delaying in recent weeks, CPH:DOX has arguably led the way in adapting to the current situation.