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.
★★★★☆ “Everyone says: ‘Less emotion, less emotion.’ How can anyone act without emotion?” So complains the eponymous veteran actress in Slovakian drama Eva Nová. She’s lamenting her plight; unemployed and at the mercy of modern, young directors and contemporary conventions towards minimalism.
★★★☆☆ 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.
★★★☆☆ 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 subject matter with Exile.
★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. “The name of a...
★★★☆☆ When discovering or revisiting the early output of an admired filmmaker, you always hope that they’ll shed new light on their more familiar...
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ “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...
