Ben Nicholson
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Toronto 2016: Goldstone review
★★★★☆ Two thirds of the way through Ivan Sen’s Goldstone a brothel madame combats the defiance of one of her trafficked girls with some discouraging advice: you can’t fight the world, you can’t change it, you can only find the place you fit within it. That worldview is put squarely to the test throughout Sen’s…
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Toronto 2016: Manchester by the Sea review
★★★★☆ Grief is shovelling snow in Kenneth Lonergan’s highly-anticipated third film Manchester by the Sea. The taciturn Lee (Casey Affleck) literally does it by day as the handyman for a Boston apartment building, and figuratively does it by night as he drinks himself into bar fights. His shoulders bow beneath the weight of some past misfortune…
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Toronto 2016: Our picks of the festival
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) comes rolling back into town today with the world premiere of Antoine Fuqua’s remake of classic western The Magnificent Seven. It kicks off a mammoth week and a half which will play host to just shy of 300 features over 130 of which will be screenings for the very…
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Film Review: Kubo and the Two Strings
★★★★☆ A young boy with a magical shamisen and a penchant for origami may not seem like the obvious choice to head a sweeping adventure story but that’s precisely who leads the charge in Laika’s beautiful new stop-motion animation Kubo and the Two Strings. Take a step back, though, and it makes perfect sense. The…
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Film Review: Anthropoid
★★★☆☆ The resistance is not just against Nazi occupation in Sean Ellis’ new Prague-set thriller Anthropoid, but against excess. “This is not a game,” snarls Cillian Murphy’s Josef Gabčík when the female companions of he and partner Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) get dolled up for a night in a dancehall, drawing the unwanted attention of…
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VOD Review: The Royal Road
★★★★☆ In her sophomore mid-length feature, The Royal Road, Jenni Olson refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a “cinematic ode to nostalgia” – it would be redundant to search for an alternative, more apposite quote to describe Olson’s eclectic and poetic essay film itself. Cinema in its very nature is memory and Olson seeks to…
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DVD Review: People of the Mountains
★★★★☆ There are a number of reasons that István Szöts’ People of the Mountains has a claim to historical importance. Despite being relatively unknown in much of the rest of Europe, it is often praised as being one of, if not the greatest, Hungarian film of all time. Moreover, its debut at the Venice Film…
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Interview: Patricio Guzmán, dir. The Pearl Button
There’s a metamorphosis during Patricio Guzmán’s breathtaking documentary The Pearl Button that somewhat echoes the one that has occurred in his recent career. He started out in cinema vérité he tells me when we meet to discuss his latest film in London, “almost photojournalism” he says via a translator. With 2010’s Nostalgia for the Light…
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DVD Review: The Shop on the High Street
★★★★★ The creeping grip of fascism has been a regular source of inspiration for filmmakers for decades, both in explicit reference to the Second World War and in more nuanced portrayals of corruptive ideology. It could be argued that the current political climate, across Europe and in the USA, illustrates with alarming perspicuity the continued…
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DVD Review: Conversation Piece
★★★☆☆ A ‘conversation piece’ is an informal family portrait painting, primarily from 18th century Britain. Such a genre of artwork forms a perfect inspiration for Luchino Visconti’s penultimate film, Conversation Piece, which echoes both its painterly beginnings and transposes its title more literally into the cinematic medium. It fascinates and stultifies in unexpectedly equal measure,…