Edinburgh
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EIFF 2013: ‘Magic Magic’ review
★★☆☆☆ Earlier this year, Chilean director Sebastián Silva premiered two films at the Sundance Film Festival. The first, Crystal Fairy, was a slight and inconspicuous road movie through Silva’s native country, staring Michael Cera. The second, Magic Magic (also starring Cera, as well as Juno Temple and Emily Browning) depicted a comparable journey through Chile…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Gold’ review
★★☆☆☆ A German western starring the inimitable actress Nina Hoss, Gold (2013) follows up its Berlinale premiere with a showing at Edinburgh. A tale of greed and migration, Thomas Arslan’s ambitious genre piece sadly fails to rise above a gentle canter in this bland and strangely pedestrian feature. An alluring balm for the soul, the…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari’ review
★★★☆☆ Confounding audiences and critics alike at the Rome Film Festival, Sofia International Film Festival and now the 67th Edinburgh Film Festival, Silent Souls director Aleksei Fedorchenko’s beguiling and perplexing expedition into the myths and rituals of the Russian Mari – Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (Nebesnye zheny lugovykh mari, 2012). Set against the…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Everybody’s Gone’ review
★★★☆☆ A surreal period piece about a small Georgian community during the dying whimpers of the Soviet Union, Georgy Paradzhanov’s Everybody’s Gone (Vse ushli, 2013) is a somewhat bizarre mix of folkloric philosophies, archaic traditions and the capricious nature of memories. Known primarily as the nephew of revered Georgian-born, Armenian-raised director Sergei Paradzhanov, Paradzhanov’s inaugural…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Shooting Bigfoot’ review
★★★☆☆ The mockumentary has steadily evolved over the last 30 years, borrowing here and there from the found footage and talking head formats that have opened doors to parody and satire. Recently, more emphasis has been placed on the actual filmmaker – how much can we trust them? Has the narrative been predetermined or simply…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Roland Hassel’ review
★★☆☆☆ UK audiences have acquired quite the taste for Scandinavian crime drama, with shows like The Killing, Borgen and Wallander all received with open arms. However, despite this Scandi-crime obsession, the name ‘Roland Hassel’ still remains unknown – and judging by Måns Månsson’s arduous debut, it’s going to stay that way. A popular 1980s television…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Comrade Kim Goes Flying’ review
★★☆☆☆ If you haven’t yet decided on your summer holiday destination, you might want to consider the fertile fields, magnificent mountain ranges and awe-inspiring architecture of North Korea. Presenting the country like a utopia of national solidarity and economic prosperity, Comrade Kim Goes Flying (2012) is the first Western-financed film made entirely within the North’s…
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EIFF 2013: ‘The Berlin File’ review
★★☆☆☆ Missions, murders and conspiracies: the basic recipe for almost all of Seung-wan Ryoo’s films. His ninth feature, The Berlin File (2013), borrows a similarly seething framework to Dachimawa Lee (2008), all about spies and the threat of North Korea. This is certainly timely given Western paranoia over a nuclear Pyongyang, but Ryoo’s new piece…
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EIFF 2013: ‘A Story of Children and Film’ review
★★★★☆ An abridged appendix to his five-hour essay The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), critic-turned-director Mark Cousins brings his latest documentary to the festival he once curated. A Story of Children and Film (2013) continues Cousins’ voyage through the annals of cinematic history, this time focusing on the role of children (due to the…
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EIFF 2013: ‘Upstream Color’ review
★★★★★ Shane Carruth’s independently financed, mind-boggler of a time travel movie Primer (2004) earned the director a well-earned cult following. Nine years later, we finally get to witness his long-awaited follow-up, Upstream Color (2013), a beguiling and exquisitely rendered Rubik’s cube of a movie with more colours than it has sides. Yet behind its high…