★★★☆☆ 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.
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.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has a history of resilience, so it was hardly surprising to see it come back stronger than ever after two years of Covid restrictions. Founded in 1995, the festival is now the leading industry event in south-east Europe, showcasing the very best films from across the Balkan peninsula.
TIFF has been a viable indicator as to which movies may be selected for Oscar nominations – or at the very least, a preview of the prospects. The last ten winners of the TIFF People’s Choice Award have all gone on to be Best Picture nominees, so Ontario Sportsbooks should be fielding many bets ahead of next year’s award show.
★★★☆☆ François Ozon remakes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Sumptuously shot and compellingly performed, this worthy remake of the celebrated original is a handsome work in its own right and is an affectionate tribute to its German predecessor.
It’s hard not to draw parallels with the fatigue we’re all feeling and the current landscape of cinema, not least a ‘best of’ list that this year so strongly reflects a sense of social anxiety, alienation and division. Topping our list (just beating Martin McDonagh’s superbly gothic The Banshees of Inisherin) is Aftersun.
★★★★☆ Royalty. Can’t live with them. Can’t stop making films about them. If it isn’t The Queen or the Netflix series The Crown, it’s Spencer. And now Marie Kreutzer’s new film Corsage puts on the crown with a spirited and witty take on Empress Elisabeth of Austria – better known in Europe as Sissi.
★★☆☆☆ Thirteen years after James Cameron’s long-awaited return with 2009’s Avatar, here comes James Cameron’s second long-awaited return with Avatar: The Way of Water. The franchise opener was a global phenomenon, smashing box office records and ushering in a new era of 3D filmmaking.
This week, James Cameron returns to the lush 3D world of Pandora with Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 monster hit Avatar. Both Cameron and Disney will be hoping this is the latest success in a long-running Hollywood blockbuster franchise, with audiences lining up to see future entries.
★★★★☆ Shot over the course of a school year, Maria Speth’s sixth feature captures the lives of a class of German 14-year-olds. At almost four hours in length, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is long, but its enormous characters and emotions more than fill the space, headed by an astonishingly charismatic teacher.
★★☆☆☆ Carlos Rafael Betancourt and Oscar Ernesto Ortega stage a two-hander about an abusive relationship, in which middle-aged David (Jonathan Del Arco) lures Justin (Héctor Medina) to his home. A strong premise is sadly let down by narrative contrivance and sophomoric psychology.
★★★★★ “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.” we are told early on in Noah Baumbach’s new film White Noise. Not since Alvy Singer bought Annie Hall all those books about death has there been such a funny and richly intelligent investigation of the particularly American anxiety about death.
★★☆☆☆ We all have directors that we don’t seem to get on with. We might admire their technical prowess or their commitment, but for some reason we just don’t click. For this critic, that’s the Dardenne brothers – Jean-Pierre and Luc – the Belgian filmmaking team that have brought a series of modern classics.
