Ben Nicholson
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Film Review: Aloys
★★★☆☆ Convention dictates that relationship dramas are, at their core, about the connection between two people. Although Tobias Nölle’s Aloys ostensibly adheres to this formula, it spends more time probing a far more interesting and unorthodox relationship; that between a person and their physical surrounds. Before a single individual appears on screen, Simon Guy Fusser’s…
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DVD Review: Author: The JT LeRoy Story
★★★☆☆ “A created thing is never invented and it is never true; it is always and ever itself.” This quote by Federico Fellini kicks off Jeff Feuerzeig’s stranger-than-fiction yarn Author: The JT LeRoy Story – and it’s the perfect way to do so. Not only does it address the elusive nature of a creation, but…
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Toronto 2016: Salt and Fire review
★★☆☆☆ You wait an age for a new Werner Herzog film and then three come along in the space of a year. In reality, the Bavarian director has always been fairly prolific but 2016 has seen his premier not, not two, but three new features. First came his mediation on the internet, Lo and Behold,…
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Toronto 2016: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail review
★★★☆☆ You might think that not having access to the courtroom might somewhat derail a documentary whose primary focus is a legal battle. The opposite is true of Steve James’ latest film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The case is question is the struggle of family-run Chinatown bank, Abacus, who were the only bank in…
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Toronto 2016: Colossal review
★★☆☆☆ Sometimes a high concept premise can prove to be a film’s downfall, opening up a world of potential that the finish product just can’t live up to. So it is with Nacho Vigalondo’s psychological kaiju dramedy Colossal. The set-up sees Anne Hathaway’s Gloria at something of a crisis point in her life and suddenly…
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Film Review: Blair Witch
★★★☆☆ Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the woods… It’s been seventeen years since unprepared audiences were first scared witless by a camping trip in the forest near Burkittsville, Maryland. The Blair Witch Project redefined the genre map, charting a new path through unfamiliar territory. Since then, that path has…
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Toronto 2016: Mimosas review
★★★★☆ Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers began with behind-the-scenes footage from two films being shot in Morocco before a film director, played by Oliver Laxe, disappeared into the wilderness. The latter half may be pure fiction, but the first was compiled with footage from…
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Toronto 2016: Austerlitz review
★★★★☆ “We who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.” This quote from W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz proves a useful reference when considering Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary of the same name. The film takes its title from the German author’s book, but to suggest it’s an adaptation would be misleading. Rather,…
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Toronto 2016: The Woman Who Left review
★★★★☆ By his own gargantuan standards, Lav Diaz’s Golden Lion winner The Woman Who Left is a mere morsel. His second picture of 2016 after the nine-hour epic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, which premiered at Berlin, this one clocks in at less than four hours and sheds much of Lullaby’s metaphysical weight. Instead,…
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Toronto 2016: The Net review
★★★☆☆ Kim Ki-duk’s career has often progressed in distinct waves – from the nasty sexual violence of his dark early work to the magical realism that produced Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring and 3-Iron. Since the glorious grotesquery of 2013’s Moebius, he’s perhaps made a move into territory that nobody could have expected from a…