Film Reviews & More
There are few better ways to spend the first weekend of July than roaming between the picturesque pastel-coloured buildings of Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, sipping a glass of Becherovka and revelling in the vibrant energy and summery glamour of KVIFF. This year, Russell Crowe was in attendance, opening the festival with a performance by his band Indoor Garden Party.
Albert Serra is a filmmaker with uncompromising vision. Whether he is reworking Cervantes’ Don Quixote with Honour of the Knights (2006), throwing together Dracula and Casanova in Story of My Death (2013), or depicting the final days of an aging monarch in The Death of Louis XIV (2015), Serra’s singular perspective shines through.
Coming from a background in photography and cinematography, Alejandro Loayza Grisi embarked on his directorial career with Utama, the tale of an elderly Quechua couple wrangling llamas in the Bolivian highlands.
★★★★☆ Alejando Loayza Grisi’s award-winning debut feature, Utama is an understated but spectacularly mounted drama about an ageing Quechua couple tending llamas on the edge of civilisation. They live in a very modest stone house that looks out onto the Bolivian altiplano.
Returning to its traditional early-July slot after two editions disrupted by Covid, the 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival felt very much like business as usual. The renovated pool was open and the music was blaring as the festival ran from 1-9 July in the picturesque setting of the chocolate-box Bohemian spa town.
★★★☆☆ Fans of text adventures and the sadly defunct Telltale Games series can get their latest fill of branching narratives and choosing their own...
Since his 1997 feature Ossos began his work with the disadvantaged communities of Fontainhas in Lisbon, Pedro Costa has become one of cinema’s most singular voices on the dispossessed.
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival returned to Bohemia this year with another feast of cinema from Europe and beyond. Running from 29 June to 7 July, this year’s festival was notable for two excellent retrospective strands to complement their competitive programmes, including the always interesting East of West Competition.
★★★★☆ Sandi Tan’s luminous and shape-shifting documentary Shirkers is a journey back in time through the 16mm reels and sinister true story of the...
★★★☆☆ Ideally, Disney would stop updating beloved cartoon classics into new live-action films, but as that seems unlikely, it’s lucky the Marc Forster-directed Christopher Robin...
Radu Jude’s film claimed the top prize at this year’s festival and it’s easy to understand why. It embraces the kind of boldly political stance of classic Polish cinema from the Communist era like a riff on both Wajda and Zanussi. The result is a formally loose, but dizzyingly dense and morally forthright examination of national attitudes and the myopia of nostalgia.
