Festivals
-
Berlin 2013: ‘The Daughter’ review
★★★★☆ The impressive third feature from Greek director Thanos Anastopoulos, The Daughter (2012) provides an intelligently rendered, gripping drama reflecting the wider issues of Greece’s current financial crisis. When 14-year-old Myrto (Savina Alimani) discovers that her father has mysteriously disappeared, she stalks the Athenian streets trying to discover where he’s fled to and why. She…
-
Berlin 2013: ‘A Fold in My Blanket’ review
★★★☆☆ Premièring in the Panorama section of this year’s 63rd Berlin Film Festival, A Fold in My Blanket (Chemi sabnis naketsi, 2013) is the debut feature from Georgian filmmaker and former Berlin resident Zaza Rusadze. Ignoring the usual gritty and harsh approach to social commentary, Rusadze’s examination of the social constraints of a small Georgian…
-
Berlin 2013: ‘I Used to Be Darker’ review
★★☆☆☆ Lo-fi realist director Matt Porterfield returns to the public eye with third feature and Berlin Film Festival entrant I Used to Be Darker (2013), a sombre and incredibly despondent look at the declining sanctity of traditional family values in contemporary American society, told from the wide-eyed and innocent perspective of a young Northern Irish…
-
Berlin 2013: ‘The Grandmaster’ review
★★★☆☆ Opening the 63rd Berlin Film Festival is Grand Jury president Wong Kar-wai’s highly anticipated, years-in-the-making martial arts epic, The Grandmaster (Yi dai zong shi, 2013). Ostensibly a biopic about real-life Wing Chun master Ip Man (Tony Leung), who famously trained Bruce Lee, Kar-wai’s sumptuous kung-fu tale is a far more commercially viable and straightforward…
-
Berlin 2013: Our Top 10 Programme Picks
This week sees the curtain rise on the 63rd incarnation of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival (7-17th February). The festival opens in spectacular style with a World Premiere showing of latest offering from this year’s jury president, Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster – just one of the many films to feature from high profile auteurs…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Living’ review
★★★★☆ Living (Zhit, 2012) is Vasily Sigarev’s challenging and provocative follow-up to his acclaimed 2009 debut Wolfy, and sees this up-and-coming Russian director return to the London Film Festival. An existential and deeply philosophical insight into the psychological damage and various manifestations death can have on the mind, Living is a mesmerising and unique perspective…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Good Vibrations’ review
★★★☆☆ Detailing the life of Belfast’s Godfather of Punk, Terri Hooley (played with a compelling level of emotion by Richard Dormer), Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations (2012) is the story of a man with a very special dream. Hooley, amidst the chaos and confusion of the Northern Irish Troubles, decides that the…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Song for Marion’ review
★★☆☆☆ British director Paul Andrew Williams offers up OAP drama Song for Marion (2012) at this year’s 56th London Film Festival, starring the considerable talents of Vanessa Redgrave, Terrance Stamp, Christopher Eccleston and Gemma Arterton. Marion (Redgrave) and her husband Arthur (Stamp) live in their small suburban bungalow, coping with the fallout of Marion’s recent…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Seven Psychopaths’ review
★★★☆☆ Following on from the award-winning, critically-acclaimed success story that was In Bruges (2008), Irish writer and director Martin McDonagh is back in business with impressively-cast, tongue-in-cheek existentialist revenge thriller Seven Psychopaths (2012), starring Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken. Screenwriter and part-time alcoholic Marty (Farrell) is struggling to get his screenplay written, and…
-
BFI London Film Festival 2012: ‘Caesar Must Die’ review
★★★★☆ Having already picked up the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival back in February and now Italy’s official selection for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 2013 Academy Awards, octogenarian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani bring their divisive docudrama Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire, 2012) to the 56th London…