Christopher Machell
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Czech100: The White World According to Daliborek review
★★★★☆ Dalibor K. lives in a small house with his mother. He works a poorly-paid job in a factory, and spends his free time playing video games and making amateur videos on YouTube. He’s also a neo-nazi. Vít Klusák’s documentary is a chilling, tragic and often ugly examination of a lonely, hateful and very confused…
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Czech100: Barefoot review
★★★★☆ Based on the autobiographical novel by Zdenek Svěrák, and co-directed with Zdenek and his son Jan, Barefoot tells the story of eight-year-old Eda (Alois Grec), who is taken to live with his extended family in the country after his city-dwelling parents resist collaboration with the occupying Nazis. A prequel to Jan Svěrák’s 1991 feature debut, The Elementary School, Barefoot brings…
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Czech100: Bear with Us review
★★☆☆☆ Director Tomás Pavlíchek’s follow-up to 2014’s Parádne Pokecal, is a sweet and broadly entertaining comedy drama which sadly falls shy of its mark. Centred around the final, fateful weekend that the Czech family will stay in their old holiday cottage, Bear with Us is charming but unfocused. The film opens in the moments before Ivana Chýlková’s…
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Czech100: Our picks of the festival
To mark the centenary of the Czech Republic’s independence, the Czech100 Festival runs from 28 October to the 9 December, a celebration of Czech art, design, fashion, theatre and of course film. The Made in Prague film strand of the festival runs from 2-4 November. Fans of the 1996 film Kolya, which won the Academy Award for…
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Film Review: Possum
★★★★☆ Best-known as the mind behind horror spoof series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum is anything but comic. Indeed, the imagery Holness conjures here could almost have come from the deranged imagination of Marenghi himself, were it not for that character’s chronic lack of talent. Luckily for us, the writer-director proves with the chillingly atmospheric Possum that…
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Interview: Zheng Kai, star of Shadow
Zheng Kai is one of China’s biggest actors, but in the West he’s hardly known. Promoting his latest film, Shadow, a visually striking period action epic from Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero, The House of Flying Daggers and The Great Wall, Zheng is hoping that all that is about to change.
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#LFF 2018: Sew the Winter to My Skin review
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew the Winter to My Skin, writer-director Jahmil X. T. Qubeka uses western tropes to mythologise…
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Film Review: Outlaw King
★★★★☆ Following up his 2016 western Hell or High Water, director David Mackenzie takes us back to medieval Scotland with Outlaw King, a bloody, visceral and rousing interpretation of Robert the Bruce’s rebellion against English tyranny. In his second collaboration with Mackenzie, Chris Pine impresses mightily with his turn as the man who would be King of…
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DVD Review: Salvador
★★★☆☆ Based on the devastating Salvadoran civil war of 1980-1992, and told from the perspective of American photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods), Oliver Stone’s third film lacks the polish of his later work, but is no less excoriating in its condemnation of the US’s support for brutal regimes ‘friendly’ to American interests. Boyle is not…
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DVD Review: Night of the Creeps
★★★★☆ Fred Dekker’s 1986 Night of the Creeps begins as it means to go on, opening with a frantic chase through the corridors of a spaceship populated with ludicrously rotund aliens, crashing into the monochrome of 1950s small town USA, before propelling us forward in time to the garish purple of the 1980s. In its irreverent…
