Ben Nicholson
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KVIFF 2017: A Ghost Story review
★★★★☆ Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery channels slow cinema maestros Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang in A Ghost Story, a beautiful meditation on grief, time and place. It doesn’t start out that way, though. Initially, A Ghost Story looks and feels like a stereotypical low-key US indie with subtle horror tropes.
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Film Review: Risk
★★★☆☆ Laura Poitras returns with another probing political documentary, but this time the film’s own post production proves as fascinating as its whistle-blowing subject. The thought of several years of unprecedented access to Julian Assange and Wikileaks is more than enough on its own to whet the appetite of documentary fans. That this access was…
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Interview: Gael Garcia Bernal and Pablo Larraín, Neruda
In 1947, Pablo Neruda was charged with treason in his native Chile and became a fugitive, eventually making an equine escape through the Andes. This is the period of the great poet’s life through which Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín decided to explore this national hero in Neruda, which stars Luis Gnecco in the title role.…
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Film Review: Free Fire
★★★☆☆ A field. A tower block. And now a disused warehouse. Over his last three films, Ben Wheatley has been perfecting the knack of a single-location drama. In the case of his new film Free Fire, Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump have shorn away the woolly political commentary and psychedelic sojourns in favour of something…
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Film Review: The Autopsy of Jane Doe
★★★☆☆ André Øvredal burst onto the scene with the irresistibly enjoyable Trollhunter in 2010, a mockumentary road trip humorously poking around under Norway’s less-travelled bridges and its folklore. For his follow-up he’s once again giving a novel twist to recognisable horror genre fare and whilst the high-concept of The Autopsy of Jane Doe is nothing…
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Film Review: Aquarius
★★★★☆ Kleber Mendonça Filho’s debut feature Neighbouring Sounds was a taut social thriller about the paranoia of Brazil’s urban middle-class. One of the results of that paranoia was a proliferation of high-rise apartment blocks to house wealthy citizens and the building of such a complex is the antagonistic force in Filho’s follow-up, Aquarius. Occupying similar…
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Kinoteka 2017: Afterimage
★★★☆☆ They say never meet your idols, and it might also be advisable not to make films about them but Andrzej Wajda always defied such cliches. Some of his early masterpieces – Man of Iron and Man of Marble – were fictional odes to Solidarity hero Lech Walesa and then he concluded a loose trilogy…
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Film Review: Elle
★★★☆☆ Isabelle Huppert’s nuanced performance proves the perfect linchpin for Paul Verhoeven’s provocative and divisive new thriller, Elle. Her character, Michèle Leblanc, is a recognisable evolution of the director’s oft-portrayed femme fatale – one that twists various misogynistic tropes into a force of destruction and emancipation. Huppert has been lauded throughout awards season, her spiky…
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Film Review: Certain Women
★★★★☆ Resilience is often a defining trait of the ordinary people that populate the stark Pacific Northwest in Kelly Reichardt’s enthralling elliptical narratives. There may rarely be melodramatic adversity to overcome – her most recent film Night Moves was the closest she’s come to fully dipping a toe in genre waters – but just to…
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DVD Review: The Spring River Flows East
★★★☆☆ “How much sorrow can one man bear? As much as a river of spring water flowing east.” This quotation from Li Yu’s 10th century poem bookends and provides the title for Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s Chinese melodrama The Spring River Flows East. The verse gives a palpable sense of foreboding to this sprawling…
