Martyn Conterio
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Film Review: Vagabond
★★★★★ Back in UK cinemas to mark a BFI retrospective of the French New Wave director, Agnès Varda’s acclaimed 1985 road movie Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, is a veritable masterwork from one of our greatest living filmmakers. A scruffy-looking girl sits in a field. It’s winter. She attempts to eat part of a baguette. But doing proves…
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Film Review: The Wild Pear Tree
★★★★★ The Wild Pear Tree is another towering cinematic experience from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The story of a father and son in conflict, it grapples with life’s big themes and the burden of family relationships. Ceylan’s films have the depth and richness of great literature, but he is equally adept at crafting transcendent…
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Cannes 2018: Ayka review
★★★★★ Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka follows a young woman over five days bitterly cold days in a city she doesn’t really know. Attempting to flee from a terrible situation, but only finding an indifferent world and uncaring people, the Kazakhstani director has made one of Cannes 2018’s most formidable entries. Ayka (Samal Yeslyamova) is a 25-year-old…
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Film Review: Knife + Heart
★★★☆☆ Yann Gonzalez follows up 2013’s You and the Night with Knife + Heart, another retro flick featuring lashings of perversity and kinky desire. The film is headlined by a tremendous Vanessa Paradis, starring as a gay-porno producer trying to get over a broken heart. Gonzalez’s cinematic reveries are indebted to 1970s exploitation cinema and…
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Film Review: Capernaum
★★★★☆ Lebanese actress and director Nadine Labaki’s third directorial feature, Capernaum, is a stirring and essential social-realist drama about lives trapped in abject poverty, featuring a superb central performance from Zain Alrafeea. Labaki’s modest debut film Caramel, which played in the Un Certain Regard programme, back in 2007, was a low-key drama about a group of…
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Film Review: Dogman
★★★☆☆ Italian director Matteo Garrone returns to UK cinemas this week with a movie a world away from the English-language fantasy Tale of Tales. Crime flick Dogman is a solid effort bearing the influence and heritage of Neorealism and Federico Fellini. Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is a dog groomer living by the seaside on the outskirts of…
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Cannes 2018: At War review
★★★★☆ Stéphane Brizé and Vincent Lindon are fast becoming the Scorsese and De Niro of French social realist cinema. Their latest effort, At War, depicts union workers involved in strike action and a fight for self-respect and dignity. At War is a gripping leftist polemic about the plight of the working class when faced with…
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Cannes 2018: BlacKkKlansman review
★★★★☆ Spike Lee goes for the jugular of the alt-right movement and President Trump in this hilarious and vital Palme d’Or contender. A comic thriller about a black police officer going undercover to infiltrate the KKK, it’s amazingly based on a true story – despite what looks to be a satirical scenario. Lee directs BlacKkKlansman…
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Cannes 2018: Climax review
★★★★☆ Gaspar Noé is back on form with Climax, a frenzied tale of a dance group training for an American tour. Their after-work party descends into a bacchanalian rave with episodes of drug-fuelled transgression, thanks to a bowl of sangria spiked with LSD. Set in 1996 and based on a true story, Noé has made something…
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Cannes 2018: Girls of the Sun review
★★★★☆ French journalist Matilde H. (Emmanuelle Bercot) joins a battalion of female Kurdish fighters taking back their hometown against misogynist psychopaths ISIS, in Eva Husson’s impressive and righteously angry war film, Girls of the Sun. Based on a true events which occurred in 2015, with names changed to protect the identities of those involved, Girls…