Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: ‘Best of Enemies’
★★★☆☆ The 1968 television debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, which accompanied that year’s Republican and Democratic conventions, had an impact on political commentary that is still evident today. New documentary Best of Enemies (2015) seeks to unpick that legacy bringing together a wealth of archival footage, including of the broadcasts themselves,…
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CPH:DOX: ‘Mallory’ review
★★★☆☆ Czech filmmaker Helena Trestíková is one of the leading exponents of what she refers to as “time collecting” cinema. It is the kind of thoughtful, ruminatory documentary that explores a story over a protracted period, its the non-fiction answer to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), made famous by Michael Apted’s Up series and recently utilised…
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CPH:DOX: ‘Field Niggas’ review
★★★★☆ “Up to Lexington, 125 / Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive.” Lou Reed’s words I’m Waiting For the Man by The Velvet Underground are how many will have been introduced to the notorious corner joining 125th and Lexington Ave. Where that song told of an outsider’s trip to Harlem to buy drugs,…
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Film Review: ‘Kill Your Friends’
★★☆☆☆ Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) came under heavy fire from some quarters for not being strident enough in its disavowal of the behaviour of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. There’s a very fine line between portraying outrageous behaviour and skewed morality in the hopes of highlighting its grotesquerie, and relenting to its…
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Film Review: ‘Taxi Tehran’
★★★★☆ By the very nature of its existence, Jafar Panahi’s latest film Taxi Tehran (2015) is a bold act of defiance. It’s his third such exploit since he was convicted by the Iranian government five years ago and banned from filmmaking, but is a far less wilfully serious affair than either 2011’s This Is Not…
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DVD Review: ‘Love Is All’
★★★★☆ Over the decades montage has been used to offer knowledge to an audience rather than to make them feel. Clearly, nobody explained this to Kim Longinotto who traverses a century of British archival footage to craft the swooning and romantic Love Is All: 100 Years of Love & Courtship (2014). Expertly stitching together clips…
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DVD Review: ‘Jurassic World’
★★★★☆ Roaring in as this year’s monster box office hit over the summer, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World (2015) initially looked like it may struggle to live up to its heritage. Steven Spielberg’s original was a watershed moment for effects-driven cinema and no sequel could have replicated the slack jaws and spine-tingling awe of that initial…
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Film Review: ‘Censored Voices’
★★★☆☆ 1967’s Six-Day War provides the setting for Censored Voices (2015), an arresting oral account of the conflict from the mouths of soldiers fresh from the battlefield; though one that never pushes its subject as far as it might. In a similar vein to recent docs like Liz Garbus’ Love, Marilyn (2012) and Vanessa Lupa’s…
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London 2015: ‘Something Better to Come’ review
★★★★☆ “Doomed to the dump for the rest of our lives. That is our reality.” This statement, spoken by a girl of just 14, may sound portentous but it exemplifies the perpetual suffering of the woebegone subjects of Something Better to Come (2014). Director Hanna Polak tried to give a voice to the disenfranchised children…
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London 2015: ‘The Corpse of Anna Fritz’ review
★★★☆☆ Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the morgue. Having all feared for so long that you would never get the film about a cadaver that you’d been yearning for, two are released in quick succession. In September, Pablo Agüero’s Eva Doesn’t Sleep (2015) – a woozy odyssey following the…