Cannes
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Cannes 2014: ‘Charlie’s Country’ review
★★★☆☆ When Aborigine actor, dancer and activist David Gulpipil was just sixteen he starred in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful Walkabout (1971), accompanying the director and his co-star Jenny Agutter to the Cannes Croisette for the film’s world premiere. Unfortunately, tribal business meant that he was unable to attend the first showing of his new film, Charlie’s…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Leviathan’ review
★★★★★ Life is “nasty, brutish, and short” wrote Thomas Hobbes, the author of the philosophical and political work from which Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014) takes its name. Returning to Cannes this year (Elena was in the Un Certain Regard strand in 2011), Zvyagintsev’s latest is a powerful and compelling retelling of the biblical Book of…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Jimmy’s Hall’ review
★★☆☆☆ Veteran British director Ken Loach makes what could to be his narrative curtain call with Irish political period piece Jimmy’s Hall (2014), which premièred at this year’s 67th Cannes Film Festival. Operating within his comfort zone, Loach wants to educate and inspire the workers, but has ended up with something entirely workmanlike. It’s the…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Tu dors Nicole’ review
★★★☆☆ If one Nicole caught headlines earlier in the festival at the Palais with Olivier Dahan’s much-maligned bioflop Grace of Monaco (2014), better notices should find themselves in line for another Nicole a short walk down the Cannes Croisette as part of Directors’ Fortnight. That’s where Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole (2014) premièred at Cannes,…
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Cannes 2014: ‘The Search’ review
★★☆☆☆ “This isn’t Saving Private Ryan,” a Russian soldier remarks to camera as one of his comrades films the aftermath of a battle and an ensuing massacre with a video camera. Yet, for all his latest offerings’s fleeting moments of gritty realism, Oscar-winning The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Search (2014) is a gruesomely sentimental…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Beautiful Youth’ review
★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Jaime Rosales’ Beautiful Youth (2014) aspires to a gritty realism but its narrative slackness make it a gimmicky and occasionally complicit portrayal of Spanish love on the dole. Carlos (Carlos Rodríguez) and Natalia (Ingrid García Jonsson) are a young couple, both…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Two Days, One Night’ review
★★★☆☆ With an unprecedented third Palme d’Or firmly in the brothers’ sights, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to the Croisette this year with a tale at the hard end of the financial crisis, Two Days, One Night (2014). Shucking off her Hollywood glamour, Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a worker at a factory that makes solar…
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Cannes 2014: ‘The Salvation’ review
★★★☆☆ Cannes has had a good run with westerns this year. Not just Tommy Lee Jones’ quasi-feminist The Homesman, but also the western aspirations of Catch Me Daddy. With The Salvation (2014), we have a much more straight-laced genre flick, a full-on modern spaghetti western from former Dogme director Kristian Levring (who, like Lars von…
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Cannes 2014: ‘The Rover’ review
★★★★☆ Australian director David Michôd made quite the impression with his outstanding first feature, 2010’s Animal Kingdom, so expectations were understandably high for his follow-up, The Rover (2014), which screened out of competition here at Cannes. Whilst not quite on the same level of his debut, Michôd’s sophomore outing is still a high quality piece…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Cold in July’ review
★★☆☆☆ It seems fitting that the UK rebirth of Icon Film Distribution – whose final release before an impromptu hiatus was Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) – should continue with another synth-heavy eighties throwback. From director Jim Mickle, who’s proved himself such an able genre chameleon with past offerings Mulberry St, Stake Land and a…