Festivals
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Edinburgh 2017: Goodbye Berlin review
★★★☆☆ Adapted from the best-selling novel Why We Took the Car, Goodbye Berlin is a quirky German coming-of-age comedy that’s funny if a bit formulaic. Maik (Tristan Gobel) is a disconnected teen; his mother is an alcoholic, his father isn’t interested and he has no friends.Maik is smitten with classmate Tatjani (Aniya Wendel), but she…
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Edinburgh 2017: God’s Own Country review
★★★★☆ Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, a poignant gay romance about self-discovery in rural West Yorkshire, has been labelled a Brokeback Mountain on the Dales. It’s an understandable analogy, but it does understate the brilliance of Lee’s vivid depiction of love, lust and lambing.Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) is left to manage the Saxby & Sons…
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Edinburgh 2017: Programme highlights
Doors to the Edinburgh International Film Festival reopened tonight with the UK premiere of acclaimed coming-of-age drama God’s Own Country. The festival, now in its 71st year, closes with the World premiere of unofficial Morrissey biopic England Is Mine.Films set to screen in the city include Final Portrait, directed by Stanley Tucci and starring Geoffrey…
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Cannes 2017: The Square, Palme d’Or winner
★★★☆☆ Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund first achieved international acclaim with his withering wintry take on middle-class masculinity in Force Majeure, causing quite a stir when it showed three years ago here in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.Now competing in the main competition, his new film The Square is a grander and more ambitious project, moving…
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Cannes 2017: The Day After review
★★★☆☆ With a director as prolific as South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, it’s not particularly surprising that he has two films showing at Cannes this year: Claire’s Camera, a colourful novella of a movie starring Isabelle Huppert; and, up for the Palme d’Or, The Day After.Bong-wan (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo) is a celebrated author who manages…
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Cannes 2017: I Am Not a Witch review
★★★★☆ The debut from Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni, I Am Not a Witch created quite the stir on premiering in Cannes. It’s the tale of a young orphan girl played by nine-year-old Maggie Mulubwa, who is accused by villagers of being a witch.The tone is set by the comic police inquest into the girl with…
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Cannes 2017: A Gentle Creature review
★★☆☆☆ Sergei Loznitsa first came to prominence with 2012’s In the Fog, a powerful drama of guilt and suspicion. His new film A Gentle Creature is loosely based on a Dostoyevsky short story and is redolent with the suffering and heaviness of the great Russian worrier. Despite a first half of great promise, the film…
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Cannes 2017: Walking Past the Future review
★★☆☆☆ The only Chinese film scheduled to screen in the official competition at Cannes this year is Li Ruijun’s underwhelming Walking Past the Future, which is being shown – quite rightly, as it happens – as part of the Un Certain Regard section.We first meet young woman Yaoting as she waits to pick up an…
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Cannes 2017: Rodin review
★☆☆☆☆ Sculpture is the art of turning lifeless stone into something that looks alive, flesh, living bodies and movement. Jacques Doillon’s Rodin, in competition at Cannes, does precisely the opposite, turning living beings – passionate artists, no less – into lumps of lifeless clay.Vincent Lindon, who deservedly won the Best Actor award here with The…
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Cannes 2017: Radiance review
★★★☆☆ In 1997, Naomi Kawase became the youngest winner of the Camera d’Or for her first feature Suzaku. She has returned seven times in total and this year enters the main competition for the fifth time with Radiance, a thoughtful meditation on seeing and cinema.Misako (Ayame Misaki) works for a company that provides audio description…
