Venice
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Venice 2015: ‘For Your Love’ review
★★☆☆☆ Following a Malickian break between films – his debut Round the Moons Between Earth and Sea was released in 1997 – Giuseppe M. Gaudino tells with For Your Love (2015), the final entry to compete for the Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, a tale of ordinary madness told in an extraordinary…
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Venice 2015: ‘Behemoth’ review
★★★★☆ China is the largest coal consumer in the world. The electricity derived from the coal-fuelled power stations drives the huge economic growth of the past decades. At the current rate of consumption it looks unlikely that the coalfields, which contain 13% of the coal in the world, will last much longer. The environmental and…
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Venice 2015: ‘Light Years’ review
★★☆☆☆ “What do you miss about mum?” Rose (Zamira Fuller) the youngest daughter of three asks her father, Dee (Muhammet Uzuner). “I used to swim in her wake,” he says. Screening in the Critic’s Week sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, British writer director Esther Campbell’s first feature Light Years (2015) is a meditation on…
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Venice 2015: Blood of My Blood review
★★★☆☆ Italian director Marco Bellocchio makes his return with Blood of My Blood (2015), another typically anomalous effort being theme rather than plot-driven. Divided into two distinct parts, it’s bound together by recurring actors and the vampiric Count Basta (Roberto Herlitzka). The first half of the film is set in the 17th century and tells…
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Toronto 2015: Read our TIFF 40 preview
This week sees the red carpet rolling into the centre of the Ontario capital for the fortieth edition of the Toronto Film Festival. Giving a headache to keen festival-goers everywhere the anniversary line-up boasts a staggering 289 feature titles including a whopping 132 world premières. Bookending the festival will be Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition, which kicks…
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Venice 2015: ‘Neon Bull’ review
★★★★☆ Debuting in the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s 72nd Venice Film Festival, August Winds (2014) director Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull (2015) tells a bizarre and sensuous story of a team of bull handlers in a remote corner of Brazil. They go from town to town in a large HGV with the bulls which they…
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Venice 2015: ‘Heart of a Dog’ review
★★☆☆☆ Heart of a Dog (2015) is the second film in competition at Venice that is essentially an illustrated director’s monologue. Whereas Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia (2015) had an ambitious if indulgent breadth, artist and musician Laurie Anderson focuses her film on her rat-terrier Lolabelle and offers a work of such ephemeral whimsy that it should…
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Venice 2015: ‘De Palma’ review
★★★☆☆ Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s unpretentious documentary De Palma (2015) reveals a clear-sighted and fascinating director, who often seems as bemused by the vagaries and inconsistencies in his own career as everyone else. Brian De Palma was initially seen as the most talented of the Young Turks who came to prominence in the seventies.…
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Venice 2015: ’11 Minutes’ review
★★★☆☆ Last time he was on the Venice Lido, Jerzy Skolimowski was chasing Vincent Gallo through the snow in 2010’s wordless survival picture Essential Killing. This year he enters the race for the Golden Lion with a film that smacks more of a precocious 17-year-old arriviste rather than a director of some 77 years. 11…
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Venice 2015: ‘Frenzy’ review
★★★☆☆ In Emin Alper’s sophomore film Frenzy (2015), two brothers look to survive the paranoia, terror and repression of a frantically unstable Turkey. Mehmet Ozgur plays Kadir, a lumbering giant of a man with a constant expression of docile worry. He is released on parole in return for becoming as an informer to the Turkish…