Festivals
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Cannes 2019: Palme d’Or lineup announced
The Cannes lineup for its 72nd edition was announced today. Following a falling out with Netflix and the increasingly heavyweight competition of Venice, the 2019 programme feels like it had something to prove – and it looks to have delivered. About half of the official competition appears to be made up of old hands and…
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Berlin 2019: Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms wins Golden Bear
With Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick passing on the baton to former Locarno artistic director Carlo Chatrian from next year, no one knew quite what to expect from this year’s competition strand. In the end, it was very much business as usual, with the Golden Bear for Best Film eventually going to Nadav Lapid’s autobiographical study…
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Berlin 2019: So Long, My Son review
★★★★☆ Sixth generation director Wang Xiaoshuai returns to Berlin with a decade-spanning family drama set against some of the most turbulent events in recent Chinese history. At just over three-hours, So Long, My Son is an emotionally wrenching film that’s epic in scope but intimate in feeling. Depicting China’s difficult transition from state-controlled communism to state-sanctioned…
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Berlin 2019: Hellhole review
★★★★☆ In Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Juliette Binoche’s character Anne rides the Paris metro and is spat at by a young man with darker skin. In Bas Devos’ Hellhole, Alba Rohrwacher’s character rides the underground in Brussels and looks on as armed police survey her fellow passengers, who also have darker skin. In Haneke’s pre-9/11 film…
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Berlin 2019: Varda by Agnès review
★★★★☆ Varda by Agnès contains the best parts of Agnès Varda: work, wit and wisdom. Though it does not reach the heights of her gloriously charming last film, Faces Places, it is still a cathartic, bittersweet swansong from one of cinema’s most endearing and adored auteurs. The film begins most unusually. The title appears, and…
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Berlin 2019: The Souvenir review
★★★★☆ At an early point in The Souvenir, the protagonist explains that filmmaking is, for her, a form of therapy. The Souvenir itself might be a form of therapy for Joanna Hogg, who wrote and directed it and has since said that she based her script directly on her own experiences. The woman’s name is…
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Berlin 2019: I Was at Home, But review
★★★★☆ Angela Schanelec’s latest film I Was at Home, But opens on some reassuring farmyard animals. A dog chases a rabbit. Another dog lies sleeping. A donkey looks out the window of a weathered old house. Life is simple and time is slow. More than you can say, however, for the film’s protagonist, a woman…
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Berlin 2019: Bait review
★★★★☆ Bait joins a recent spate of British films that have abandoned the cities to depict a countryside in crisis. But, unlike social-realist dramas like The Levelling, Dark River and God’s Own Country, Mark Jenkin’s wonderfully weird debut subverts the kitchen sink template to create one of Berlin’s most original and satisfying films. The Cornish…
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IFFR 2019: Koko-di Koko-da review
★★★★☆ In Swedish filmmaker Johannes Nyholm’s second feature Koko-di Koko-da, three bizarre characters from a children’s music box come to life to haunt a grief-stricken couple as they try to escape from a nightmarish cyclical maze of a scenario which unfolds each time in the middle of a forest. In an interview, Johannes Nyholm described…
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Berlin 2019: The Plagiarists review
★★★★☆ A pair of self-absorbed millennials are forced to confront the lack of originality behind their ideas in Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists, a dramatic comedy that asks the questions; who has the “right” to access culture and who possesses the authority to speak on its behalf? The film opens with an argument between aspiring memoirist…