Festivals
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Toronto 2018: Saf review
★★★★☆ Turkish director Ali Vatansever returns with his second feature, Saf, a social drama that examines the human cost of urban renewal. Out-of-work Kamir (Erol Afsin) seems perpetually on the brink of destitution. His faultless insistence on doing the right thing means that he won’t take a job with the construction company who are exploiting…
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Toronto 2018: Freaks review
★★★☆☆ In a cinematic landscape saturated with superhero mega-blockbusters from Marvel, Fox and Warner Bros., writer-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein take their cue from the X-Men series’ themes of oppression to deliver Freaks – a small-scale, intriguing superhero indie with a killer hook. One of the great, and largely overlooked failures of modern superhero movies is their…
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Toronto 2018: Cities of Last Things review
★★★☆☆ In the near future, Lao Zhang (Jack Kao) stalks and murders three people, including an elderly, hospitalised man and his ex-wife, before killing himself. The question at the heart of Ho Di Wing’s Cities of Last Things is what could have driven him to commit these crimes. Told in three chronologically reversed stages, we…
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Venice 2018: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma wins Golden Lion
The winner of last year’s Golden Lion for The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro joked “Let me see if I can pronounce this,” before announcing to very few peoples’ surprise that Alfonso Cuarón had won Venice’s top prize for his sumptuous memoir of childhood, Roma. In his speech, he pointed out the serendipity that…
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Toronto 2018: Loro review
★★★★☆ Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro begins as it means to go on. A lawyer-baiting disclaimer informs us that the film is not based on real events (even when it is), that any similarity to real people is purely unintentional (even when it isn’t), and that any testimony from reliable witnesses on the aforementioned unrelated parties has had nothing…
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Toronto 2018: One Last Deal review
★★★★☆ As Olavi (Heikki Nousiainen) approaches retirement, he reflects on his career as an antiques dealer. With little to show for it and no inheritance to leave his semi-estranged daughter Lea (Pirjo Lonka) and teenage grandson Otto (Amos Brotherus), he decides to go out with a final make or break deal in Finnish director Klaus…
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Toronto 2018: Endzeit review
★★★☆☆ With the saturation of the zombie as modern cinema’s de facto monster, it’s difficult to imagine in what new direction the shuffling dead can possibly amble. Yet, with the imperfect but fascinating Endzeit, director Carolina Hellsgård ultimately guides her ravenous wanderers down an original and largely unbeaten track. The film’s first half is its…
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Toronto 2018: Our picks of the festival
As the Toronto International Film Festival gears up for its 2018 edition (6-16 September), awards contenders, experimental filmmakers and indie hopefuls come together for a 10-day extravaganza of some of the world’s best cinema. This year’s festival opens with Netflix’s Outlaw King, the latest from director David Mackenzie and starring Chris Pine. Both Mackenzie and Pine…
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Venice 2018: Vox Lux review
★★★★★ We’ve already had A Star Is Born here at Venice. Now, with Brady Corbet’s latest film Vox Lux, we have A Star Is Torn – a truly unique power-pop epic starring Natalie Portman as the mononymous singer Celeste, whose rise to fame is intertwined with other tragic trajectories. Corbet originally caught our attention with the…
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Venice 2018: Dragged Across Concrete review
★★☆☆☆ S. Craig Zahler falls between ever-widening stools with his brutal new crime drama Dragged Across Concrete, which might have been more representative of the viewing experience had it been called Dragged Slowly Across Concrete. Recently-released criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) returns home to find his mother hooking to pay for drugs. Meanwhile two cops, Brett…