Ben Nicholson
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DVD Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1’
★★★☆☆ “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.” Sun Tzu may not have been talking about The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) but these words in The Art of War provide a neat critique of a film aptly concerned with campaign strategy. This is the film – and the first…
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Special Feature: BFI presents Věra Chytilová
“Form seemed to have gone rigid.” Few sentences or sentiments could better encapsulate the climate in which Věra Chytilová, Queen of the Czech New Wave, forged her boundary-pushing directorial career – or the spunky attitude with which she approached her craft. Perhaps most fittingly, they are her own words. Even before her cinematic education, she…
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Film Review: ‘White Bird in a Blizzard’
★★★☆☆ “In a blink my virginity disappeared just like my mother.” Delivered with raw teenage cynicism by rising star Shailene Woodley’s Kat, this line of voiceover perfectly encapsulates the primary dynamics of Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard (2014). An adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s novel of the same name, the film almost disregards the…
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Film Review: ‘Sea Without Shore’
★★☆☆☆ The endless oceans of love and grief are plumbed in esoteric and emotive fashion in André Semanza and Fernanda Lippi’s flawed and ambitious art film, Sea Without Shore (2015). Coming over a decade after the duo’s first feature collaboration, Ashes of God (2003), it sets out a similar stall, seeking to fuse together interpretive…
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Glasgow 2015: Dispatch #2
The joy of any film festival lies in the sheer breadth of cinematic dishes from which one can pick the tastiest morsels. These might be pictures that are never going to see the light of day in British cinemas, or gems awaiting imminent release that will likely remain under-appreciated. In the latter half of CineVue’s…
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Glasgow 2015: Warsaw Uprising review
★★★☆☆ There are a number of dichotomies at the heart of Warsaw Uprising (2014), a new film directed by Jan Komasa and masterminded by the Warsaw Uprising Museum. The most pronounced of these is its blend of documentary and fiction, and the effects of both. The former comes through six hours of footage mined from…
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Glasgow 2015: Electric Boogaloo review
★★★★☆ From 1979 to 1989, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were cinema’s premier purveyors of low-budget schlock. “It’s hard to say the words ‘Cannon Films’ without laughing” says one commentator at the very beginning of Mark Hartley’s documentary history of the company, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014). That is proved…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Clown’ review
★★☆☆☆ Coulrophobia is a fear ripe for exploitation in horror movies, most famously done in Tommy Lee Wallace’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It (1990), which transformed colourful clowns into sheer terror for a generation. It’s perhaps a deeper and darker anxiety that is actually at play in Jon Watts’ Clown (2014), though, which eschews the…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘The Golden Era’ review
★★☆☆☆ Biographic films are always difficult beasts to tame. Filmmakers can often be torn between integrity and dramatic licence in bringing a real life to the big screen. Ann Hui’s The Golden Era (2014) is no different; a lavish, lengthy period piece depicting the life of revered Chinese writer Xiao Hong. On one hand it…
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Glasgow 2015: Dispatch #1
One of the most interesting things about picking out a viewing schedule at a film festival is the emergence of unexpected trends. Something that was easily apparent on the first two days of our trip to this year’s Glasgow Film Festival was the array of quality independent cinema on show by female directors. Gender imbalance…