Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: Ran
★★★★★ During his illustrious career, when asked what he considered to be his best film, Akira Kurosawa would commonly respond “my next one”. After 1985, however, his answer changed to Ran. At once gloriously epic and deeply personal, there are clear parallels to be found between the ageing director – who was 73 when filming…
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DVD Review: Rocco and His Brothers
★★★★☆ 1960 was a memorable year for Italian cinema. It saw the releases of several major films: Federico Fellini’s legendary La Dolce Vita; the first instalment of Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy of decadence, L’Avventura; Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women, for which Sophia Loren won her Best Actress Oscar. Another of the major success stories of the…
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DVD Review: Underground
★★★★☆ “A war is no war until brother kills brother.” This is just one of the devastating conclusions of Emir Kusturica’s bold and brilliant Underground; his lurid, comically absurd, and deeply divisive parable about the death of Yugoslavia. Kusturica was paraded as Fellini’s heir for his exuberant style, but there is more an echo of…
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DVD Review: Bagful of Fleas, Something Different
★★★☆☆ There was little that could prepare the world for the release of Věra Chytilová’s incredible Daisies in 1966, even looking at her own prior output would have been largely in vain. Prior to the philosophical anarchy of her most celebrated piece, she was more concerned with mild formal experimentation and the potential of cinéma…
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Film Review: Propaganda Game
★★★☆☆ The Hermit Kingdom is a nickname inspired by North Korea’s secrecy and withdrawal from the wider world. The last remaining stronghold of Communism, it is a country reviled and lampooned in the West, where its mystery inspires ridicule and anxiety in equal measure. Last year, threats were made against cinemas intended to screen Seth…
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Film Review: The Benefactor
★★☆☆☆ At the heart of Andrew Renzi’s directorial debut The Benefactor is a kernel of an intriguing character study about the price of love and forgiveness and the desire to buy both. Surrounding it is a tangled mass of loose narrative threads, none of which offer any real satisfaction and most of which fall somewhere…
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DVD Review: Hawks and Sparrows, Pigsty
★★★☆☆ It’s a dog eat dog world out there. Or is that a hawk eat sparrow world? Or pig eat man? Or perhaps man eat man? Our insatiable proclivity towards to devouring one another is manifested in various ways through the two Pier Paolo Pasolini films released on Blu-ray this week as part of Eureka’s…
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Berlin 2016: Mapplethorpe review
★★★☆☆ “You can do it as a hobby, but what are you ever going to do with art?” This was the attitude of Robert Mapplethorpe’s father, Harry, who never understood the desire of his mischievous, provocative artistically-inclined son. Robert would go on to become famous for his stylish black and white photography, often challenging in…
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Film Review: The American Dreamer
★★★☆☆ Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson could hardly have better timed their thirty-day intersection with Dennis Hopper that formed the raw materials of the quasi-documentary The American Dreamer. They caught Hopper fresh from Easy Rider when he was a generational icon, high on his success – and just plain high – and boldly attempting…
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IFFR 2016: Préjudice review
★★★☆☆ Notions of marginalisation, responsibility and the ambiguities of nature versus nurture all collide in Antoine Cuypers’ handsome and austere feature debut, Préjudice. The film is built around enormously compelling performances from Thomas Blanchard and Nathalie Baye, as an antagonistic son and mother. They take the leads in a taut chamber piece that pulls at…
