Ben Nicholson
-
KVIFF 2016: Waves review
★★★☆☆ There’s a distinct whiff of Mike Leigh running through Waves, the fiction feature debut of Polish director Grzegorz Zariczny. A social realist drama about the difficulties facing working families, it is constructed with autobiographical details proffered by its non-professional lead actresses who also work-shopped improvisation within the narrative.
-
KVIFF 2016: Exile review
★★★☆☆ Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture used clay figurines to represent the non-existent images of the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia to startling effect and wide acclaim. Having survived the regime’s genocide in the late seventies, Panh has spent much of his career delving into his country’s bloody history and he returns again to the…
-
Film Review: Weiner
★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. “The name of a man,” he asserts, “is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.” Its deployment in this particular context could hardly be more apposite; the tragedy of a man driven to build…
-
DVD Review: Joshua Oppenheimer: Early Works
★★★☆☆ When discovering or revisiting the early output of an admired filmmaker, you always hope that they’ll shed new light on their more familiar films. We long to find rough-hewn progenitors with identifiable threads of narrative, theme, and style that run though and can be observed, maturing into more substantial pieces. In the case of…
-
Film Review: Notes on Blindness
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour of trying to understand what it is like to be without sight. But cinema is memory and in the case of someone who has lost their sight, the idea of flickering…
-
Open City Docs 2016: The Great Wall review
★★★☆☆ Its title may refer to an undeniably physical barrier but Tadhg O’Sullivan’s The Great Wall, the opening film at this year’s Open City Docs Festival in London, opts for a more transmutable definition of no more permeable boundaries. Kafka’s short story The Building of the Great Wall of China is the only narration, intermittently…
-
Open City Docs 2016: Depth Two review
★★★★☆ “No body, no crime,” reads a note taken during a meeting involving Slobodan Milošević presented during Ognjen Glavonić’s Depth Two. It’s haunting not purely because of the powerful lingering effect of a statement of this kind, which refers to the secret ethnic cleansing of citizens of Albanian descent during the Kosovan War. It is…
-
Open City Docs 2016: Our picks of the festival
2016 has already been a real delight for the documentary connoisseur in the UK. The end of April saw the inaugural edition of the Frames of Representation festival which concentrates on films navigating the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction and art. Next was the UK’s premier doc event, Sheffield Doc/Fest, showcasing an array of the most…
-
Interview: Matteo Garrone, dir. Tale of Tales
Matteo Garrone first came to prominence internationally upon the release of his striking mafia epic Gomorrah – it might be hard to imagine just a few short years later he’s off into the woods for a lavish cavort in a land of fairy tales. That is the case in Tale of Tales, though, a deliciously…
-
Sheffield DocFest 2016: Unlocking the Cage review
★★★☆☆ A pioneering and hugely unlikely legal case might seem like an ideal focus for legendary filmmaking duo Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, whose partnership is perhaps best known for the apex in political campaign docs, The War Room. However, that film was more about illuminating the mechanics of a dark art, which is a…
