Berlin 2016: Hail, Caesar! review
★★★☆☆ ‘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 […]
Interview: July Jung, ‘A Girl at My Door’
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 […]
DVD Review: ‘Electricity’
★☆☆☆☆ 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 […]
Interview: Jessica Hausner on new film ‘Amour Fou’
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 […]
Film Review: ‘The Last of the Unjust’
★★★★★ 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) […]
Johannes Holzhausen, ‘The Museum’
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 […]
Film Review: ‘Guys and Dolls’
★★★★☆ 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 […]
Film Review: ‘The Green Prince’
★☆☆☆☆ 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 […]
Film Review: ‘The Great Museum’
★★★★☆ 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 […]
Film Review: ‘The Circle’
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
LPFF 2014: ‘Eyes of a Thief’ review
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
Dietrich Brüggemann, ‘Stations of the Cross’
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 […]
LPFF 2014: Programme preview
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 […]
Film Review: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
★★★★★ 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 Review: ‘Concerning Violence’
★★★★☆ 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 […]