Venice

★★★★☆ Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft had written The Joy of Sex, or better still a porn parody of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Neither of these analogies are particularly accurate but we’re in the right territory – the wild region to use a more literal translation of the original title – for Mexican director Amat Escalante’s polymorphously…

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★★★☆☆ Scottish filmmaker Duncan Lloyd (Pieter van der Houwen) has been tasked with the seemingly impossible job of making a documentary on the Belgian monach King Nicolas III (Peter van der Begin), entitled Our King, intended to improve the king’s bumbling image. In fact, there’s something of our own future king Charles III in the…

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★★★★☆ In every festival there’s a film where the attrition rate of walkouts is notably high. So far at this year’s Venice, the ignominious Golden Lion would have to go to the impressionistic documentary Spira Mirabilis. And it is a pity, because although the film is a challenging watch, demanding attention and patience from audiences,…

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★★★☆☆ “The killing is only a small part,” says Gerald, one of the subjects of Ulrich Seidl’s new film Safari. By its conclusion you may well be inclined to agree with him. There’s the stalking, the anticipation, the price list, like some murderous menu for the hunters to browse through, the stalking of the prey…

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★★★☆☆ You have to admire the nerve of Dutch director Martin Koolhoven. The title card for his first English language effort reads ‘Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone‘, and the film itself is full of confidence and grand gestures: an ornery bloody-minded western with grit in its gut and a wet splash of horror. Liz (Dakota Fanning) lives…

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★★★☆☆ “Let me tell you a story,” says Michael (Michael Silva), a spiritually inspired young man in the wastes of the Chilean desert. The stories he goes on to recount will appear intermittently throughout Christopher Murray’s new work The Blind Christ, which is in competition for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.…

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★★★☆☆ “I could’ve been a contender,” declares Marlon Brando’s brooding pugilist from On the Waterfront, and every actor these days seems to have a crack at the boxing picture to see if they can go the distance. Along with classic turns from Paul Newman and Anthony Quinn, we’ve had Stallone, De Niro and new kids…

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★★☆☆☆ In a way the title of Charlie Siskel’s documentary American Anarchist is something of a misnomer. Anarchy as a political movement doesn’t get much in terms of description. Beyond some context about demonstrations in the sixties and William Powell, its subject is only partly American in that he spent his childhood in Britain and…

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★★★★☆ Korean director Kim Jee-woon is a prolific and accomplished generic gadfly with a western – The Good, The Bad and The Weird – a horror – A Tale of Two Sisters – and a superlative revenge thriller – I Saw the Devil – all under his belt. With his new film The Age of…

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★★★☆☆ There are seven stages to grief, we’re told, from denial to acceptance. Andreas Dalsgaard and Obaidah Zytoon’s The War Show is structured with a similar seven stage process, but here the grief is not for a single individual but for a whole population, a nation who have suffered incredible violence and many who have…

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