Festivals
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Cannes 2018: Ash Is Purest White review
★★★☆☆ Returning to Cannes for a fifth time, leading Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke presents his new film Ash Is Purest White, a story of love, sacrifice and betrayal spanning seventeen years of contemporary Chinese history. From as early as Platform, Jia has been linking the trajectories of his characters’ lives with the rapidly changing scenery…
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Cannes 2018: Cold War review
★★★★★ Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida, My Summer of Love) enters the front-running for the Cannes Palme d’Or with his new film Cold War, a beautifully composed tone poem to doomed love in Cold War Europe. Less is most definitely more in Cold War. Using the same academy ratio and frosty black and white…
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Cannes 2018: Yomeddine review
★★★★☆ Leprosy, poverty and a story of social exclusion are the unlikely ingredients for the deeply engaging and often funny road movie Yomeddine, which entered the competition for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Beshay (Rady Gamal) is a man who has recovered from leprosy but still bears the horrible…
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Cannes 2018: Rafiki review
★★★☆☆ The Kenyan government had already banned Wanuri Kahiu’s second feature, Rafiki, before it even premiered in Cannes. Telling the story of a pair of young women who fall in love only to be ostracised by their local community, the government feared it would “promote lesbianism” which remains illegal in Kenya. All of which has…
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Cannes 2018: Birds of Passage review
★★★★★ From the duo behind Embrace of the Serpent comes another extraordinary movie full of ethnographic detail and mystical symbolism. In Birds of Passage, a revenge tragedy plot involving the burgeoning market in weed is transformed into a riveting form of acid western. Set in the arid coastal Guajira region of Colombia, among an indigenous…
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Cannes 2018: Wildlife review
★★★☆☆ There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine actor Paul Dano turns his hand to directing in Wildlife, which opened the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Dano’s directorial debut is a sincere and often handsome portrait of American suburban melancholia. It’s 1960: a “heck…
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Cannes 2018: Our picks of the festival
The red carpet unrolls, the paparazzi mount their step ladders, and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina kiss above the Palais du Cinema under an azure sky. The talk in the build up to 71st Cannes Film Festival has been far less sunny. The controversial face-off with Netflix and the banning of selfies on the red carpet…
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Cannes 2018: Palme d’Or lineup announced
With the lead-up dominated by thinkpieces over Netflix’s exclusion from this year’s Cannes competition lineup, it was something of a relief to finally be able to discuss the film’s that would be vying for the Palme d’Or and Un Certain Regard accolades. With 18 out of a potential 20 Palme d’Or contenders announced, we could perhaps…
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Berlin 2018: Yardie review
★★★☆☆ Hackney-born actor, DJ and now filmmaker Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with Yardie, a Caribbean twist on the well-worn conventions of the British gangster movie, based on the book by Victor Headley. The film follows a Jamaican drug courier called D (Aml Ameen) who leaves the gang violence of Kingston, Jamaica only to…
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Berlin 2018: What Comes Around review
★★★★☆ While Middle Eastern cinema seems to be having a fresh resurgence of late, films that shine a light on ordinary people in these countries remain few and far between. With an industry all but decimated by years of political and religious unrest in the area, many fans of Arab cinema have had to content…