Festivals

★★☆☆☆ You wait an age for a new Werner Herzog film and then three come along in the space of a year. In reality, the Bavarian director has always been fairly prolific but 2016 has seen his premier not, not two, but three new features. First came his mediation on the internet, Lo and Behold,…

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★★★☆☆ You might think that not having access to the courtroom might somewhat derail a documentary whose primary focus is a legal battle. The opposite is true of Steve James’ latest film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The case is question is the struggle of family-run Chinatown bank, Abacus, who were the only bank in…

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★★☆☆☆ Sometimes a high concept premise can prove to be a film’s downfall, opening up a world of potential that the finish product just can’t live up to. So it is with Nacho Vigalondo’s psychological kaiju dramedy Colossal. The set-up sees Anne Hathaway’s Gloria at something of a crisis point in her life and suddenly…

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★★★★☆ Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers began with behind-the-scenes footage from two films being shot in Morocco before a film director, played by Oliver Laxe, disappeared into the wilderness. The latter half may be pure fiction, but the first was compiled with footage from…

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★★★★☆ “We who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.” This quote from W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz proves a useful reference when considering Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary of the same name. The film takes its title from the German author’s book, but to suggest it’s an adaptation would be misleading. Rather,…

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★★★★☆ By his own gargantuan standards, Lav Diaz’s Golden Lion winner The Woman Who Left is a mere morsel. His second picture of 2016 after the nine-hour epic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, which premiered at Berlin, this one clocks in at less than four hours and sheds much of Lullaby’s metaphysical weight. Instead,…

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★★★☆☆ Kim Ki-duk’s career has often progressed in distinct waves – from the nasty sexual violence of his dark early work to the magical realism that produced Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring and 3-Iron. Since the glorious grotesquery of 2013’s Moebius, he’s perhaps made a move into territory that nobody could have expected from a…

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★★★★☆ Two thirds of the way through Ivan Sen’s Goldstone a brothel madame combats the defiance of one of her trafficked girls with some discouraging advice: you can’t fight the world, you can’t change it, you can only find the place you fit within it. That worldview is put squarely to the test throughout Sen’s…

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★★★★☆ Grief is shovelling snow in Kenneth Lonergan’s highly-anticipated third film Manchester by the Sea. The taciturn Lee (Casey Affleck) literally does it by day as the handyman for a Boston apartment building, and figuratively does it by night as he drinks himself into bar fights. His shoulders bow beneath the weight of some past misfortune…

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The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) comes rolling back into town today with the world premiere of Antoine Fuqua’s remake of classic western The Magnificent Seven. It kicks off a mammoth week and a half which will play host to just shy of 300 features over 130 of which will be screenings for the very…

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