Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: ‘Goodbye to Language’
★★★☆☆ Henri Matisse was 71 when his inspirational Zulma appeared at the Salon de Paris to rave reviews of its vitality and youthful experimentation. It is difficult not to cast your mind to Matisse when you see the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard, the 83-year-old French filmmaker whose Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage, 2013)…
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Toronto 2014: ‘From What Is Before’ review
★★★★☆ “The memory of a cataclysm” is how a voiceover at the end of Lav Diaz’s latest monumental feat, the Locarno-storming From What Is Before (Mula sa kung ano ang noon, 2014), describes the preceding five-and-a-half hours. One character foresees armageddon, while another promises that “hell is coming.” In what could well be the director’s…
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Toronto 2014: Read our TIFF programme preview
This Thursday (4 September), the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival will kick off in Canada with David Dobkin’s courtroom drama The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall. Over the proceeding week and a half, before the cinematic cornucopia reaches its conclusion with Brit Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos, festival-goers will attend almost 300…
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Film Review: ‘The Guest’
★★★★☆ Rightly selected as the opening salvo of this year’s well-attended 15th Film4 FrightFest in London, fervently followed American genre director Adam Wingard’s The Guest (2014) had the difficult task of coming after the excellent besieged family bloodbath You’re Next (2013), which had audiences howling with delight back in in 2011. The Guest once again…
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Film Review: ‘Night Moves’
★★★★☆ The films of Kelly Reichardt have often explored the relationship between people and their environment – whether in tune or fatally at odds. Like a polar opposite to the autumnal flow of Old Joy (2006), the director’s latest delves into the ambiguous world of fanatical environmentalism in a location ubiquitous with her oeuvre, Oregon.…
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Film Review: ‘Lucy’
★★★★☆ There’s a popular myth often perpetuated in movies that humans only employ a small percentage of their brain’s capacity. One of the reasons this idea endures is the following assertion that there is the potential for us to unlock untapped mental power if only we could breach the fabled 10% barrier. With just a…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Faust’
★★★★★ F.W. Murnau was a director who fused the sweeping atmosphere of silent film, with a visual poetry all of his very own and in doing so crafted some of the most incredible films ever made. Before heading to Hollywood in the late 1920s – where he would make the sensational Sunrise (1927) – his…
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DVD Review: ‘Independencia’
★★★★☆ Filipino director Raya Martin was only twenty-four years old when he made Independencia (2009), the second film in his ongoing trilogy about the colonial past of his home country. It is a work steeped in history – national, cultural and cinematic – that explores the themes that have been recurrent in the output of…
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DVD Review: ‘Calvary’
★★★★☆ “One part humanism to nine parts gallows humour” is how one character describes themselves in John Michael McDonagh’s sophomore feature, Calvary (2014). These are just two of the aspects that go into the director’s study of religion and integrity in a broken modern Ireland. After a terrific central turn as the forthright policeman at…
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Film Review: ‘Wakolda’
★★★☆☆ Notions of childhood innocence and guilt through complicity are played against one another in Argentine director Lucía Puenzo’s deliberate but unexceptional pot-boiler Wakolda (2013). Premièring in the Un Certain Regard programme at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Puenzo’s latest went on to be nominated as Argentina’s official entry at this year’s Academy Awards amidst…
