★★★☆☆ ‘Second time’s a charm’ is not the feeling that hits home when reflecting upon the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, the opening film of this year’s Berlinale. Second as this is their second time opening the festival (after True Grit did the honours in […]
The Un Certain Regard section was where the debut feature, A Girl at My Door (2014) from South Korean director July Jung unspooled to insidious acclaim by those who saw it. Following this auspicious beginning it played London Film Festival twelve months ago and […]
★☆☆☆☆ The way Bryn Higgins’ sophomore feature, Electricity (2014), sees itself is perhaps an integral part of its ultimate failure. It considers itself as stylish, sexy, tough, visually inspiring and numerous other targets it misses by a country mile. In fact Electricity never gets […]
With the release of her fourth feature film in 13 years Jessica Hausner continues the current flow of quietly antagonistic Austrian auteurs speaking truth against the powerful constructs of a bourgeois society that eats its own for sport and pleasure. After the success of […]
★★★★★ Claude Lanzmann is the custodian of the memory and oral tradition of the Holocaust. His life’s work has encompassed numerous films from his grand opus Shoah (1985) to Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 Heures (2001) and Un Vivant Qui Passe (1999). With The […]
For a filmmaker responsible for an insightful opening of the curtain of an arts institution like he does on Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in The Great Museum (2014) it was grounding when CineVue chatted to Johannes Holzhausen on Skype, sitting in what looked like […]
★★★★☆ Damon Runyon is often imitated but never bettered – we won’t even hold it against him that he’s partly responsible (via proxy) for the gangster films of Guy Ritchie and his ilk. Runyon’s portrayal of the New York underworld and it’s denizens with […]
★☆☆☆☆ The Green Prince (2014) is the fantastical story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hassan Yousef one of the founders of Hamas; who was an informant for the Israeli internal secret service Shin Bet for more than 10 years until his escape […]
★★★★☆ There’s something inherently cinematic and therefore mysterious about institutions, and with the release of Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum (2014) we have Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery (2014) arriving on screens in January. It’s worth mentioning both films in the same breath as they […]
★★★☆☆ The notion that documentary and drama should not be mixed is overturned by The Circle (2014), an ingenious and touching slice of little known gay history beautifully made by Stefan Haupt and the Swiss entry to the 2014 Best Foreign Language Oscar race. […]
★★★☆☆ The London Palestinian Film Festival opened with Najwa Najjar’s Eyes of a Thief (2014), Palestine’s chosen representative in the 2014 Academy Awards. Following on from her well received debut Pomegranates And Myrrh (2008), Eyes From A Thief is, like Najjar’s previous film, grounded […]
Director Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross (2014) finally arrives on UK cinema screens this week after premiering in the competition strand of this year’s Berlinale where it won a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. It certainly a formally audacious and impressive work that rewards repeat viewings […]
Palestinian cinema is relatively young in comparison to Arab cinema as a whole. This is for obvious reasons, but that hasn’t stopped a vibrancy developing over the last twenty years that has wowed both audiences and international film festivals. This year they have submitted […]
★★★★★ There are certain works that define the experience of what cinema is, and because of this they become difficult to create a discourse around. Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is such a film. The idea of contemplating and theorising Kubrick’s […]
★★★★☆ In answer to what he would do to follow 2011’s multi-layered collage The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Göran Hugo Olsson has settled on the fight against Colonists in Africa by its indigenous people by again raiding the archives of Swedish Television for Concerning […]
★★★☆☆ After causing a stir on the Croisette where it premiered last year in the Critic’s Week Sidebar You and the Night (2013) is the debut feature from Yann Gonzalez and it is as infuriating as it’s spectacular. With a wholly original score from […]
★★☆☆☆ There has been an influx of documentaries recently that have focused on the so called “Arab Spring”. Some, like Wiam Bedirxan & Ossama Mohammed’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (2013) and Talal Derki’s The Return To Homs (2013), offer […]
★★★★☆ Encircling Rome like a tightening lariat that threatens to flood the environs of the Italian capital with ghosts of its past and future, the Grande Raccordo Anulare is the focus of Gianfranco Rosi’s latest documentary. The surprise winner of the Golden Lion at […]
