Martyn Conterio
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Film Review: The Wild Goose Lake
★★★★☆ Chinese director Diao Yi’nan’s first film in five years, The Wild Goose Lake is a gangster flick mainlining on pure fatalism and turns the tables on genre conventions and expectations. The result is an occasionally opaque but tremendously well-made melodrama. When mobster Zhou Zenong (Ge Hu) accidentally shoots down a copper at a roadblock,…
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Film Review: A Hidden Life
★★★★★ Authentic being, leaps of faith and mortality haunt every frame of Terrence Malick’s latest opus, A Hidden Life (aka Radegund). Basing his new film on the life and death of WW2 conscientious objector, Franz Jägerstätter, the reclusive American auteur is unlikely to win over detractors, but true believers will swoon. In 1939, Austrian yokel…
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#LFF 2019: The El Duce Tapes review
★★★★☆ The El Duce Tapes is one of the best music docs to come along in a while. Funny, honest, grotesque and fascinated by a pot-bellied miscreant most would run a mile from, the film is a thought-provoking foray into anti-commercial art and outsider lifestyles. You might have seen Eldon Hoke before. The musician made…
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Film Review: Waiting for the Barbarians
★★★★☆ In J.M. Coetzee’s acclaimed 1980 novel, waiting for the invading barbarians to show up is akin to waiting for Godot. Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s haunting adaptation shapes the book into a desolate cavalry western. Filmed in Morocco and Italy with an international cast, Mark Rylance leads Waiting for the Barbarians. His character, a nameless…
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#LFF 2019: Leap of Faith review
★★★★☆ Alexandre O. Philippe continues his run of feature-length documentaries concentrated on classic genre movies, with a look at William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Often described as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, this deep dive benefits from Friedkin serving as our personal guide. As a production, The Exorcist was virtually sui generis. In the history of…
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Film Review: Jaws
★★★★★ Jaws didn’t just reel in millions at the global box office, it heralded the summer blockbuster era and turned Steven Spielberg into a superstar. Back on the big screen for a limited UK run, the director’s classy fish-themed thriller still wows. The making of Jaws was almost the undoing of Spielberg. Filmed on and…
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Film Review: Zombi Child
★★★☆☆ Bertrand Bonello’s arthouse horror oddity Zombi Child works best as a film about colonial trauma and the tragic history of Haiti. Those expecting a traditional zombie flick with flesh-eating ghouls clawing at the doors will soon learn this one is more Jacques Tourneur in style than a George A. Romero feast of gore. It’s…
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Cannes 2019: Oh Mercy! review
★★☆☆☆ It’s time the Cannes Film Festival called a moratorium on screening the works of French director Arnaud Desplechin until he can come back with work as good as A Christmas Tale. Co-written with Léa Mysius, Oh Mercy! has no business competing for the Palme d’Or.
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Film Review: Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
★★★☆☆ Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound serves as a history lesson and welcome tribute to a crucial element of moviemaking routinely ignored. Critics love to zero in on the relationship between directors and their stars, or directors and cinematographers, but rarely (if ever) the sound editor or ADR supervisor. How often do we…
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Film Review: Atlantics
★★★★☆ Expanding on her own 2009 short film, actor turned director Mati Diop returns to the timely subject of economic migrants from Africa braving the open ocean for a better life with Atlantics. Her feature-length debut is an enigmatic ghost story tackling worker exploitation. Atlantics begins like a common-or-garden social realist drama. Or does it?…