Festivals
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Berlin 2013: ‘Interior. Leather Bar.’ review
★★☆☆☆ Polymath James Franco and director Travis Mathews take it upon themselves to re-imagine the lost 40-minutes of William Friedkin’s controversial drama Cruising (1980) in new film Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). The absent footage was reputedly cut due to its sexually graphic content by the MPAA, so that Friedkin could secure an R-rating upon Cruising’s…
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Berlin 2013: ‘The Meteor’ review
★★★★☆ French-Canadian director François Delisle’s fourth film, The Meteor (Le météore, 2013), is an avant-garde exploration of isolation that quite rightly appears in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section. Eschewing conventional narrative techniques, the film includes not a single line of dialogue or actual human interaction and instead attempts to delve deep into its characters…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Dark Blood’ review
★★★☆☆ “You’re a disturbing young man” says Buffy (Judy Davis) to Boy (River Phoenix). The latter is showing the former around a fallout shelter in the Utah desert, redecorated by him for prosperity as a mystical cave. It’s one of the few completed interior scenes in the long-lost but not forgotten Dark Blood, Dutch auteur…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Prince Avalanche’ review
★★☆☆☆ David Gordon Green makes an underwhelming return to his indie roots with this tiresome remake of Icelandic comedy-drama Either Way (Á annan Veg, 2011), re-titled Prince Avalanche (2013) and starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch. Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Hirsch) spend the summer of 1988 remarking the seemingly endless roads that run through a…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Shirley: Visions of Reality’ review
★★★☆☆ In Austrian video artist Gustav Deutsch’s Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013), pictures literally speak for themselves, with this experimental film using prominent US painter Edward Hopper’s calculated renderings of American society to tell the story of a fictional actress – a prime example of art imitating art. Recreated through the guise of thirteen of…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Camille Claudel 1915’ review
★★★☆☆ Challenging and incredibly divisive, French director Bruno Dumont is renowned for his harrowing and burdensome portraits of modern life, that fall somewhere in-between realist drama and avant-garde otherness. His latest feature, Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), is a biopic about this titular sculptress and remains just as taxing, yet curiously lacks the elegance and provocation…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Before Midnight’ review
★★★★☆ American director Richard Linklater returns to the tale of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) that he began seventeen years ago in Before Sunrise (1995) with 2013’s Before Midnight. Set nine years after the events of Before Sunset (2004), this is an eloquently scripted dissection of a now middle-aged couple’s relationship. Reflective in…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Side Effects’ review
★★★★☆ Reputedly prolific American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s final big screen outing, 2013’s Side Effects – starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones – is a compelling thriller exploring the blurred lines between psychopharmacology and the US justice system. Protagonist Emily Taylor’s (Mara) life is an endless cycle of misery and paranoia – each day…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Closed Curtain’ review
★★★☆☆ Despite finding himself under house arrest and banned from filmmaking for ‘committing propaganda against the Iranian government’, resourceful director Jafar Panahi follows his critically acclaimed documentary This Is Not a Film (2011) with Closed Curtain (Parde, 2013) – an existential example of meta-filmmaking disguised as a humanist chamber piece about political repression. Closed Curtain…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Frances Ha’ review
★★★★☆ Shot entirely in black and white, Frances Ha (2012) sees US indie director Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig team up once again after their successful partnership with Greenberg (2010). This time round, Gerwig is integral in the scriptwriting process, creating a delightfully twee, metropolitan fairytale about the difficulties of growing-up when you’re already fully-grown. Frances (Gerwig)…