Christopher Machell
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Film Review: Prayers for the Stolen
★★★★★ In a remote rural Mexican village a war wages between a drug cartel and the authorities. The villagers are inevitably caught up in the middle, their lives eroded and destroyed in unimaginable ways. Tatiana Huezo’s narrative debut is a harrowing account of lives held hostage by exterior forces.
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Film Review: Compartment No. 6
★★★★☆ Compartment No. 6 is a love story deeper and more affecting than any conventional meet-cute. Setting his film largely on the dingy confines of an overnight train, Kuosmanen kindles a tender love story between two lost souls.
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CPH:DOX 2022: Karaoke Paradise review
★★★★☆ In his third feature, filmmaker Einari Paakkanen turns his attention to the phenomenon of Finnish karaoke and its capacity to bring disparate people together. Karaoke Paradise is a charming, insightful and often moving study of normal people’s lives through the medium of belting out great tunes.
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CPH:DOX 2022: Into the Ice review
★★★☆☆ Seasoned science and nature documentary director Lars Ostenfeld makes the jump into film with Into the Ice, a beautiful, gripping and ultimately terrifying journey into the impacts of climate change on the Greenland ice sheet.
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CPH:DOX 2022: The Fall review
★★★★☆ Impressing last year with art mystery The Lost Leonardo, director Andreas Koefoed returns with altogether different piece of work. Far from the globe-trotting scope of his previous film, The Fall is an intimate and sensitive portrait of adolescence.
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Film Review: A Night of Knowing Nothing
★★★★☆ Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s debut feature A Night of Knowing Nothing blends documentary and narrative fiction to examine political activism, rebellion and cinephilia under the right-wing rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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Film Review: Escape from Mogadishu
★★★★☆ Ryu Seung-wan is a veteran of this kind of picture – his previous film, The Battleship Island, had a similar ‘escape from’ premise in a period setting – so it’s no surprise that Escape from Mogadishu is a rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.
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SXSW 2022: The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon review
★★★☆☆ When the legend becomes truth, print the legend. So goes Matt Eskey’s directorial debut, The Mojo Manifesto, a documentary in thrall to its subject. Luckily for us, its subject is Mojo Nixon (née Neill Kirby McMillan), the cartoonishly raucous musician and one of cow-punk’s leading proponents.
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SXSW 2022: Raquel 1:1 review
★★★☆☆ How do we balance modern faith with the often unsavoury legacies of religion, and how are those legacies used to excuse immoral behaviour in the present? Filmmaker Mariana Bastos gestures at these questions in her second feature (her first as solo director), a compelling magical realist drama.
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SXSW 2022: Me Little Me review
★★★☆☆ In her debut feature, Canadian filmmaker Elizabeth Ayiku has a crafted a thoughtful and tender drama. Marshalling an excellent performance from A’Keyah Dasia Williams as protagonist Mya, Me Little Me is moving, if a little disjointed in its construction.