Ben Nicholson
-
KVIFF 2018: Our festival highlights
Radu Jude’s film claimed the top prize at this year’s festival and it’s easy to understand why. It embraces the kind of boldly political stance of classic Polish cinema from the Communist era like a riff on both Wajda and Zanussi. The result is a formally loose, but dizzyingly dense and morally forthright examination of…
-
KVIFF 2018: Winter Flies review
★★★★☆ Olmo Omerzu’s follow-up to 2015’s Family Film is another tale of children left to their own devices by negligent parents, but this time takes the form of winning road movie caper Winter Flies. The title perhaps refers to resolute dipterans that have refused to be cowed by seasonal colder weather and are attempting to make…
-
KVIFF 2018: Profile review
★★★☆☆ Timur Bekmambetov’s new thriller Profile seeks to explore the murky world of how social media is used to recruit vulnerable young women to ISIS. The results are as compelling as they are silly. Back when the entirely desktop-based Unfriended was released in 2014, Bekmambetov was candid about wanting to expand the conceit into an…
-
KVIFF 2018: I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians review
★★★★☆ Following 2015’s Aferim!, Radu Jude returns to the topic of historical Romanian anti-Semitism in his furious new satire “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” which picked up the top prize at the 53rd edition of Karlovy Vary. Where Aferim! was a shaggy-dog road trip through 19th century Wallachia, Barbarians…
-
Sheffield DocFest 2018: Our picks of the programme
This week sees the return of one of the highlights of the UK’s festival calendar in the form of Sheffield Doc/Fest, which runs from 7-12 June for its 2018 edition. As ever, the programme of over 200 documentary shorts and features boasts an array of non-fiction from thrilling crowd-pleasers and thought-provoking journalism to virtual realities…
-
Film Review: A Cambodian Spring
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2017, Chris Kelly’s A Cambodian Spring is an intimate and upsetting account of community activism and the shaping of modern Cambodia. “This is a fake democracy,” says a resident of the area around Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh, which the government has sold from…
-
DVD Review: Intimate Lighting
★★★★☆ Despite being relatively light on political content, Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting – re-released on DVD and Blu-ray this week – was banned for twenty years under Soviet rule but has since become an enduring favourite of the Czech New Wave. One of the few directors of the Czech New Wave not to come out…
-
Film Review: A Prominent Patient
★★★☆☆ The always interesting Karel Roden is the MVP in Julius Ševčík’s A Prominent Patient, playing Czechoslovakian diplomat Jan Masaryk in this handsomely mounted Czech answer to a certain Oscar-winning Gary Oldman drama. This divergence comes in the very crux of A Prominent Patient, and indeed inspires its English-language title (for use in territories where…
-
LSFF 2018: Our festival roundup
The London Short Film Festival returned to the capital this month with another cornucopia of new and beloved shorts from around the world. Taking place from 12 – 21 January it gave UK audiences a chance to catch up with shorts that have premiered on the festival circuit over the past year as well as…
-
Film Review: Pitch Perfect 3
★★☆☆☆ The Barden Bellas return to the spotlight in their third outing, an uneven European tour that wraps a nice bow around the group’s acca-xploits, but lacks what made the original special. They never expected to get this far. They were only in it for their love of singing. They weren’t even supposed to have…
