Venice

★★☆☆☆ You know when you buy a new camera, go into the garden to try it out and just snap things to see how the photographs look without necessarily caring what you capture? That’s basically what director Wim Wenders seems to be doing with new film The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez. Beginning with a series…

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★★★★☆ Premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival has been greatly anticipated. Firstly, the breakout success of last year’s border epic Sicario has whetted appetites to see where the Canadian filmmaker will go next and secondly, because of the prospect of gleaning how Villeneuve will take to science fiction with the prospect…

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★★☆☆☆ “I want to marry a lighthouse keeper. / And live by the side of the sea.” sang Erika Eigan, but according to The Light Between Oceans, the new film from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, the advice would be: don’t. Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, a veteran back from the First World War with a…

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In Rome earlier this morning, Alberto Barbera announced one of the most impressive Venice Film Festival lineups in recent years. With stiff competition from Berlin and the encroaching Toronto – which often sees Venice stripped of its North American journalists mid-week – Venice has had hard times attracting major filmmakers. Without the glitzy market of…

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The red carpet has been walked upon, the Spritz has been supped and the lion has roared. This year’s Golden Lion selection is yet another surprise choice, the perfectly serviceable but by no means extraordinary Venezuelan-set drama From Afar, which follows the unlikely relationship between a maker of false teeth and a Caracas street tough.…

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★★★☆☆ Winner of the prestigious Golden Lion at Venice this year, Lorenzo Vigas’ debut film From Afar (2015) is a tightly controlled tale of quiet desperation and alienation set in present day Venezuela. Armando (Pablo Larraín muse Alfredo Castro) is a well-off small businessman with a false teeth business who regularly cruises the streets of…

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★★★☆☆ When it comes to the Holocaust, remembering is a serious matter: a moral imperative in fact. However, as the years pass, living memory inevitably diminishes with the death of the survivors, witnesses and the perpetrators. That which must not be forgotten, never forgotten, eventually will be. Life becomes history. In Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s…

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★★★☆☆ This has been the year of the tragic music star documentary. Brett Morgen’s Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) might have underwhelmed but Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), which premièred at Cannes, was a powerful demonstration of how the form could reveal previously unsuspected depths of emotion behind the tabloid headlines. Tragic chanteuse Janis Joplin has…

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★☆☆☆☆ Daniel Alfredson’s appallingly bland backwoods drama Go With Me (2015) stars Anthony Hopkins as ex-logger Lester, who comes to the aid of harassed waitress Lillian (Julia Stiles). While Lester spends his evenings making garden ornaments in memory of his dead wife, Lillian is redecorating her dead mother’s house. Trouble lurks in the hedgerows via…

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