The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival returned to Bohemia this year with another feast of cinema from Europe and beyond. Running from 29 June to 7 July, this year’s festival was particularly notable for two excellent retrospective strands to complement their competitive programmes, including the always interesting East of West Continue Reading
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” Radu Jude’s film claimed the top prize at this year’s festival and it’s easy to understand why. It embraces the kind of boldly political stance of classic Polish cinema from the Communist era like a riff on both Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Olmo Omerzu’s follow-up to the stinging satire of 2015’s Family Film is another tale of children left to their own devices by negligent parents, but this time takes the form of an unsentimental but winning road movie caper Winter Flies. The title presumably refers to resolute dipterans that have refused Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Unfolding entirely on a laptop screen, Timur Bekmambetov’s new thriller Profile seeks to explore the murky world of how social media is used to recruit vulnerable young women to ISIS. The results are as compelling as they are silly. Back when the entirely desktop-based Unfriended was released in 2014, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Following 2015’s Aferim!, Radu Jude returns to the topic of historical Romanian anti-Semitism in his furious new satire “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” which picked up the top prize at the 53rd edition of Karlovy Vary. Where Aferim! was a shaggy-dog road trip Continue Reading
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival returned for its 52nd year from 30 June-8 July. The beautiful spa town on the edge of the Slavkov forest in Western Bohemia played host to A-list stars and directors from around the world.As ever, showcased were some titles from this year’s Cannes Film Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Georgian director Rati Oneli’s City of the Sun is in a constant dialogue with philosophical treatise and epic poetry, but the humanity shines through in his meditative exploration of a half-abandoned mining town.The title of City of the Sun is taken from a 1602 utopian text of the same Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery channels slow cinema maestros Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang in A Ghost Story, a beautiful meditation on grief, time, and place which screened at Karlovy Vary.It doesn’t start out that way, though. Initially, A Ghost Story looks and feels like a stereotypical Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Shimmering corn fields and the blazing midday sun may not seem like natural environs for spooky supernatural horror, but Jiří Sádek’s The Noonday Witch employs them to suitably disconcerting effect. With a tinge of Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin, it re-purposes a traditional Slavonic folktale – popularised both as Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “I don’t know where I’m going,” writes Ján Kollár in his diary. He’s recently been booked in for surgery, his chances of surviving it are 50/50, and he has now set off on a literal and philosophical wander in the time he knows he has left. All of this Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ For those with prior knowledge of his work, Petr Václav’s latest film We Are Never Alone may represent his career thus far in microcosm. It folds in the Roma subject matter of his lauded debut Marian; Karel Roden and Lenka Vlasáková star as a despairing couple, much like in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Don’t be fooled by the banal title – there’s a great deal of interest beneath the pastel hues and fine furnishings of Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu’s Family Film. Indeed, the title itself is the first of many sardonic misdirections in a piece whose screenplay delights in about-turns and ratcheting Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “Everyone says: ‘Less emotion, less emotion.’ How can anyone act without emotion?” So complains the eponymous veteran actress in Slovakian drama Eva Nová. She’s lamenting her plight; unemployed and at the mercy of modern, young directors and contemporary conventions towards minimalism. The first interesting thing about this exchange is Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ There’s a distinct whiff of Mike Leigh running through Waves, the fiction feature debut of Polish director Grzegorz Zariczny. A social realist drama about the difficulties facing working families, it is constructed with autobiographical details proffered by its non-professional lead actresses who also work-shopped improvisation within the narrative structure. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture used clay figurines to represent the non-existent images of the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia to startling effect and wide acclaim. Having survived the regime’s genocide in the late seventies, Panh has spent much of his career delving into his country’s bloody history and Continue Reading