Festivals
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Berlin 2018: Our picks of the programme
The 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival kicks off today with Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. A return to the stop-motion animation the American auteur employed in his quirky re-imagining of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s latest may sound like an incongruous choice to open a festival that prides itself on its…
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Tallinn 2017: Festival highlights & awards roundup
Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival returned to the Estonian capital for its 21st instalment from 17 November – 3 December. Unlike some other A-list European festivals, the chilly darkness provides the perfect excuse to settle in and enjoy a wealth of international cinema. Films from a variety of other European festivals were part of an…
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Filmfest Hamburg celebrates 25 years
We were invited to attend Filmfest Hamburg’s bicentennial as guest of the “Come To Hamburg” initiative; a project set up to highlight the city’s hidden treasures through the writing of culture and travel bloggers from around the world. Normally, festivals are exclusive events, organised to create pre-release buzz or to market films lacking distribution deals.…
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#LFF 2017: Loveless review
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t hope to come close to.Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) are a relatively young…
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#LFF 2017: The Rider review
★★★★☆ A poetic expression of hopelessness in a land of limited opportunities, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider follows a Bronco-rider from South Dakota as he traverses a fictionalised version of his ill-fated pursuit of a dream that’s galloping away from him.After suffering a near fatal head injury at a rodeo, and learning he might never ride…
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#LFF 2017: The Killing of a Sacred Deer review
★★★★☆ Two years on from The Lobster, pioneering Greek Weird Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the London Film Festival with his 2017 Palme d’Or nominee The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a dark and twisted psychological thriller set in suburban America. The first sight we see is a beating human heart. It looks nothing…
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#LFF 2017: Journeyman review
★★★☆☆ Few British actors can lay claim to the kind of performance which we have come to expect and appreciate from Paddy Considine. Journeyman, which Considine writes, directs and stars in as champion boxer Matty Burton, is further proof of his impressive versatility.Six years on from the near unanimous praise for his directorial debut Tyrannosaur,…
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#LFF 2017: The Shape of Water review
★★★★☆ Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won his first Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival with The Shape of Water, a monstrous fairytale about the love between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and a creature from the Black Lagoon.Is anyone making cinema as lusciously beautiful as Guillermo del Toro at the moment?…
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#LFF 2017: Princess Cyd review
★★★★★ Billed as the coming-of-age story of an adolescent American teenage girl, Princess Cyd is so much more. Told with tenderness and a perceptive humanist eye by writer-director Stephen Cone, his latest film is an affecting exploration of loss, love and trauma.Disproving any kind of ludicrous notion that a male director is incapable of crafting…
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#LFF 2017: Mountain review
★★★☆☆ Inexpressibly beautiful, breathtaking yet terrifying images from snow-capped peaks and vertical cliff faces dominate Jennifer Peedom’s latest documentary Mountain, which explores the magnetic pull exercised by these perilously dangerous summits. A meditation on the potential held, respect demanded and inherent risks in scaling such heights is coupled with a swift history of human kind’s…