D.W. Mault

★★★☆☆ 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 in a reality that emphasises a humanism within a context that…

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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 in the awakening of black humour within the rigid tale of…

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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 a film for the Best Foreign Language Category at the Academy…

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★★★★★ 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 iconic film and then having to put these thoughts into words…

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★★★★☆ 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 Violence (2014). This time he is using as the contextual device…

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★★★☆☆ 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 the director’s brother, M83, it seems unsure of what it wants…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 no niceties or homilies. Rather, they are a constantly evolving narrative…

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★★★★☆ 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 last year’s Venice Film Festival, a honour that shocked and angered…

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★★★★★ Certain cinematic experiences pander to repeated sittings. Eventually maturity brings with it enlightenment and the secret passages that spark the conscious through sheer luminosity. Jacques Tati’s observation satire Playtime (1967) is one such événement and one can both envy and pity a first time viewer as they take their seat and prepare for the…

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★★★☆☆ The Case Against 8 (2014) looks at one of the most divisive issues in contemporary American life: that of same sex marriage. Directors Ben Cotner and Ryan White track the five year battle to get California’s Proposition 8 overturned. Prop 8 as it was colloquially known was a state constitutional amendment passed in the…

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