Glasgow
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Clown’ review
★★☆☆☆ Coulrophobia is a fear ripe for exploitation in horror movies, most famously done in Tommy Lee Wallace’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It (1990), which transformed colourful clowns into sheer terror for a generation. It’s perhaps a deeper and darker anxiety that is actually at play in Jon Watts’ Clown (2014), though, which eschews the…
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Glasgow 2015: Ann Hui on new film ‘The Golden Era’
Ann Hui’s voice is an uncommon one in world cinema. Probably the most acclaimed of the Hong Kong New Wave directors, Hui began her career in the late 1970s in a film industry then dominated by kung fu movies. She continued to make films in Hong Kong for over thirty years, striking an almost impossible…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘The Golden Era’ review
★★☆☆☆ Biographic films are always difficult beasts to tame. Filmmakers can often be torn between integrity and dramatic licence in bringing a real life to the big screen. Ann Hui’s The Golden Era (2014) is no different; a lavish, lengthy period piece depicting the life of revered Chinese writer Xiao Hong. On one hand it…
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Glasgow 2015: Dispatch #1
One of the most interesting things about picking out a viewing schedule at a film festival is the emergence of unexpected trends. Something that was easily apparent on the first two days of our trip to this year’s Glasgow Film Festival was the array of quality independent cinema on show by female directors. Gender imbalance…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn’
★★★☆☆ Liv Corfixen’s My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2014) starts from the unfortunate position of being wide open to comparison with another behind-the-scenes peek, Eleanor Coppola’s Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). Where that film followed the incredible disasters that befell Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) shoot, this documents the far…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘The Falling’ review
★★★★☆ Carol Morley’s follow-up to the lauded Dreams of a Life (2011) shares a thematic through line with its predecessor. That documentary investigated the story and circumstances of a young woman who was found dead and alone in a North London flat in 2006. Morley’s new film once again mines a central mystery, this time…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Phoenix’ review
★★★★☆ In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mysterious and metaphysical The Face of Another (1966), notions of identity both personal and national are explored through the story of man whose face is irrevocably scarred in a terrible accident. The indelible image of his bandaged head is brought to mind in the opening reel of Christian Petzold’s latest offering,…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ review
★★★☆☆ Meditations on art, mortality and performance are the lofty thematics explored in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), a discursive drama from French director Olivier Assayas which features two exceptional performances from Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Binoche plays Maria Enders, an established and world famous actress who, twenty years prior, was made famous by…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Wild Tales’ review
★★★☆☆ One of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award hopefuls, Argentinian director Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) is an exuberant, obsidian-black comedy of violence and vengeance. Divided into a series of isolated sketches, each one tells a short story about how quickly madness can rip through the vestiges of civilisation with the appropriate…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘New Girlfriend’ review
★★★☆☆ Another year, another film from prolific French director and festival regular François Ozon. After the (intentional) inscrutability of the lead in Jeune et Jolie (2013), his latest film The New Girlfriend (2014) is thankfully a far deeper exploration of its two equally complex central characters. Based on a Ruth Rendell story – though inflected…