Ben Nicholson
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IFFR 2016: The Bride review
★★★☆☆ The bold and deeply felt symbolism of Federico García Lorca’s famous matrimonial drama, Blood Wedding, makes it ripe for cinematic treatment. There are rich thematic veins to be opened in the writer’s text and his beguiling visual motifs are screaming from the page to be fully realised on screen. Carlos Saura’s flamenco effort Blood…
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IFFR 2016: Our top picks
The International Film Festival Rotterdam kicks off its 45th edition this evening with the world premiere of Dutch survival drama Beyond Sleep. Directed by Boudewijn Koole, it follows an ambitious geologist on a search for meteorites in Norwegian swampland. It will be followed by twelve days of eclectic cinema from all around the world ranging…
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DVD Review: Godard: The Essential Collection
★★★★☆ Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, Breathless starts as the director meant to go on. With an effortless Gallic cool, Jean-Paul Belmondo, a Gauloises dangling from his lip, hot-wires an American car and accelerates off at high speed. He breaks rules and dances to his own tune all over town, and that is precisely was in turn to…
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Sundance 2016: How to Let Go of the World review
★★☆☆☆ At the beginning of Josh Fox’s breakout 2010 documentary Gasland, he stated that he was not a pessimist. Further along the same road of ecological activism that he embarked on in that film, his newest endeavour sees him presented with a very real challenge to his otherwise sunny disposition. Even before it’s started, How…
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Film Review: Spotlight
★★★★☆ There’s a sense of the years being rolled back in Tom McCarthy’s gripping, Oscar-worthy journalism drama Spotlight. On the one hand, there’s almost a nostalgia that comes with watching – and participating in – the craft of meticulous, urgent and dedicated long-form journalism. When there’s talk of deadlines, it’s all about whether the reporters…
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Film Review: Dark Places
★☆☆☆☆ After the dark satire of David Fincher’s excellent Gone Girl, the possibility of fast-tracking another of Gillian Flynn’s intricately plotted thrillers from page to screen must have seemed like a fantastic idea. Dark Places revolves around another complicated woman, the kind of role that Charlize Theron would be perfect for if she added a…
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DVD Review: Hiroshima Mon Amour
★★★★★ The opening shot of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour observes the entwined limbs of two lovers as ash settles on their skin before the image dissolves into those same bodies beaded with sweat. The ash, of course, suggests the nuclear fallout of the atomic bombing of the titular city in August of 1945 eliding…
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DVD Review: 45 Years
★★★★☆ One of the most bizarre omissions from last week’s Bafta nominations was that Charlotte Rampling did not receive a nod for her heart-breaking turn in Andrew Haigh’s superlative British drama, 45 Years (2015). She and Tom Courtenay appear as a couple approaching their belated 40th wedding anniversary party, suddenly plagued by spectres of the…
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Film Review: Partisan
★★★☆☆ Vincent Cassel possesses such a steely, lupine charm that he always engenders the characters he plays with subtle menace and ample charisma. His new film Partisan is no exception, giving the actor much of the heavy lifting to do in a deliberate almost-thriller that provokes many questions, but leaves explanation equivocally out of focus…
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Film of the Week: Joy
★★★★☆ Reinvention and familial turmoil have long been hallmarks of David O. Russell’s particular brand of knockabout cinema and his latest collaboration with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, Joy (2015), is a wonderful fairytale marriage of the two. It’s a banana flambé with extra rum that brazenly throws together folksy storytelling, arch soap opera melodrama…
