CineVue
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Venice 2012: Kim Ki-duk’s ‘Pieta’ wins Golden Lion
The Venice Film Festival is no stranger to controversy. Often, the jury collectively select a fittingly quirky, infuriating drama to cap the ten days of cinematic celebration. In 2010, Jury President Quentin Tarantino awarded former girlfriend Sofia Coppola the top prize for Somewhere, a film so blandly ordinary that many found its win truly baffling.…
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Venice 2012: ‘The Master’ review
★★★★★ Arguably the most eagerly anticipated select of the 69th Venice Film Festival, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) tells the story of demobbed sailor Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), who following VJ day finds himself at a loose-end, drifting from job to job with a savage temper and an alcohol addiction. His inexorable slide toward…
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Venice 2012: ‘Passion’ review
★★☆☆☆ Brian De Palma is undeniably one of the most erratic directors to have come out of the 1970s Golden Generation. Responsible for the genre-defining magnificence of Scarface (1983) and Carrie (1976), he’s also liable to make snorefests like The Black Dahlia (2006) and Mission to Mars (2000). Often thrilling and infuriating in the same…
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Venice 2012: ‘The Company You Keep’ review
★★★☆☆ Robert Redford directs and stars in The Company You Keep (2012), which premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival. Redford plays Jim Grant, a small town lawyer bringing up his daughter following the death of his wife in a car accident. His life is turned on its head, however, when crusading reporter Ben…
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Film Review: ‘Twenty8k’
★★☆☆☆ The London 2012 Paralympics end this weekend, bringing to a close a summer of British athletics that has seen unrivalled joy that has infected the populace as well as those taking part. As such, a film centring on corrupt politicians in the lead up to this year’s games may not quite seem to fit…
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Venice 2012: ‘Heaven’s Gate’ review
★★☆☆☆ So much has already been said and written about the Heaven’s Gate saga – countless articles, a book, a documentary, and much more – but apparently, it ain’t over yet. Michael Cimino’s 1980 “flawed masterpiece” – ask any French critic – or “unqualified disaster” (Vincent Canby, New York Times) has just received the Criterion…
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Venice 2012: ‘Me Too’ review
★★★☆☆ Alexei Balabanov’s latest film, Me Too (Ja Tozhe Khochu, 2012), begins almost like a gangster film. We watch on as the Bandit (Aleksander Mosin) sees off four adversaries in a back-alley shoot out, but the piece soon veers away at a 90 degree angle from genre filmmaking territory and goes to a place much…
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Interview: Dylan Southern, ‘Shut Up and Play the Hits’
Following on from 2010’s acclaimed Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace return this week with Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012), a new project detailing the final days of James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem. Despite looking like similar projects on paper, the directorial partnership’s latest work is an altogether…
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Venice 2012: ‘The Fifth Season’ review
★★★★★ Deep in Belgium’s Ardennes forest, life goes on in a small rustic village as it has done for many years. Seasons come and go, farmers work the land and milk the cows, children play in the woods imitating bird song and festivals are celebrated. The village, dominated by the steepled church, seems immune from…
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Interview: Alice Rohrwacher, director of ‘Corpo Celeste’
Corpo Celeste (2011) is the assured debut feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. Centring around a community in urban Italy through the eyes of the adolescent Marta the naturalistic and allegorical film examines this microcosm from an outsiders view, and in particular the role of the church in modern Italian society. With the film out…