Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ British actors Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson star as unexpected Nazi resistors Anna and Otto Quangel in Vincent Perez’s Alone in Berlin, adapted from the 1947 novel Each Dies Only for Himself by Hans Fallada, which wasn’t translated into […]
★★★★☆ The adventures and anxieties of a young boy, one who possesses impetuous curiosity and imagination and whose gestures resemble the stature of a much older man, are shown in contrast to the traumatic experiences of migrants seeking refuge on […]
★☆☆☆☆ British theatre director Michael Grandage makes his cinematic debut with Genius, based on A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius and starring an excitable Jude Law as novelist Thomas Wolfe. With a screenplay written by Gladiator writer John […]
★★★★☆ The winner of two Silver Bears in 2013 for An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Bosnian director Danis Tanović returns to the Berlinale competition with his spirited new film Death in Sarajevo. Adapted from the 2014 […]
★★★★☆ French director André Téchiné teams up with Céline Sciamma to write the screenplay for a tale of two young men struggling with their identities whilst living in the unforgiving landscape of rural France. Being 17, screening in competition in […]
★★★★☆ Life in the twenty-first century is saturated with images. Our hourly or more likely by-the-minute interaction with screens presents us with a multitude of ideas, news and more often than not, waffle clamouring for our attention. Yet a singular […]
★★★★☆ Two Edinburgh regulars, Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari, have collaborated to produce an insightful film-essay exchange, their differing filmmaking styles bursting with ideas and inspiring new thought in each other in Life May Be (2014). The project was conceived […]
★★★★☆ The lives of women in prostitution trying to survive in Chicago and young girls at risk of taking the same path, is revealed with compelling sensitivity in Kim Longinotto’s latest documentary, Dreamcatcher (2015). The film follows co-founder and executive […]
★★★★☆ Writer and director Nathan Silver again seeks to explore the dynamics of communal living just as he did in Exit Elena (2012) to Uncertain Terms (2014). In the latter film, pregnant teens take refuge in the home of Carla […]
★★★☆☆ Now an established voice in American indie cinema, Kelly Reichardt has created films that consistently demonstrate a sensitivity towards characterisation that address with compassion, a diversity of approaches to the human condition. What drives an individual to self deception, […]
★★★★☆ For their 2013 collaboration, Interior. Leather Bar, Travis Mathews and James Franco worked on the premise of a reimagining the lost 40 minutes of William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising – cut by censors who deemed it too explicit. Rather […]
★★★★☆ A new restoration of G.W. Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece Diary of a Lost Girl, demonstrates the luminosity of his iconic star, Louise Brooks, in what was their final of two legendary collaborations, the other being Pandora’s Box in the same […]
Born from its namesake – the widely distributed art and culture magazine – and having doubled the number of films screening since their first edition in 2011, Aesthetica Short Film Festival returns to York from 6-9 November. Popping up in […]
★★★★☆ The Norwegian protagonist of Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance (2014), Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård), is a plough operator by profession, steadily carving a path towards his destination. It’s perhaps this occupational characteristic that best explains how such […]
★★★★☆ Coco Moodysson’s autobiographical 2008 graphic novel Never Goodnight related the delight and difficultly of forming a punk band, aged 13, in 1982. Along with two friends, and against the expectations of their peers and the adults around them, Moodysson […]
★★★☆☆ For Roman Polanski’s latest, the now octogenarian director has adapted David Ives play Venus in Fur, which is itself based on the 1870 novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Taking place entirely in a theatre setting, […]
★★★☆☆ During the making of his 2007 film, Bomb Harvest, director Kim Mordaunt was inspired by the experience of young people in Laos who make their living extracting for sale, the metal and explosives from bombs dropped during the ‘secret […]
★★★★☆ Winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize last year (amongst a host of other accolades), 2013’s What Now? Remind Me (E Agora? Lembra-me) is a revealing self-portrait and memoir by Portuguese filmmaker Joaquim Pinto that emerges as […]