Glasgow 2021: Shorta review
★★★☆☆ Open a film with a close-up of a young black man screaming “I can’t breathe,” his neck under the knee of a policeman,...
★★★★☆ Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six years, R.M.N. is a multi-faceted, oft-bleak, and occasionally surreal portrait of racism and toxic masculinity in Romanian society. In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
★★★★★ Childhood friends Na-Young (Greta Lee) and Hae-Sung’s (Yoo Teo) young lives are irrevocably changed when Na-Young’s family emigrate from South Korea to Canada, until the pair reconnect twelve years later. Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song.
★★★☆☆ Open a film with a close-up of a young black man screaming “I can’t breathe,” his neck under the knee of a policeman,...
★★★☆☆ The glossy veneer of fame, fortune and respectability of a well-to-do family rapidly loses its shine in Bettina Oberli’s My Wonderful Wanda. A...
★★★☆☆ A loving ode to a pioneering, life-changing team, Steelers: The World’s First Gay Rugby Club is a courageous, invigorating account of struggles on,...
★★★★☆ Murmur – a patient, probing, profoundly moving exploration of one woman’s battle against past demons and crippling loneliness – announces first-time writer-director Heather...
★★☆☆☆ The savage beauty of Finland’s northernmost reaches provides a stunning backdrop for Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu’s The Last Ones. Never coming close to...
★★★☆☆ With store-bought equipment, a woeful budget, cheap cars and cheaper apartments, the undercover lives of the Cuban Five could not have been further...
★★★☆☆ Three female members of a family struggle with multi-generational secrets, trauma and the hardships of motherhood in Yang Lina’s Spring Tide. The Chinese...
★★★☆☆ Bookended by visits to the same stretch of coastline under very different circumstances, Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen’s My Favorite War makes a perilous journey...