Martyn Conterio
-
Film Review: Leto
★★★☆☆ Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Palme d’Or-nominated musical Leto is set among key figures dominating the early 1980s rock club scene in St. Petersburg. Initially fun and lively, it runs out of puff way before the end. “Soviet musicians must find all that is good in humanity,” the jobsworth committee chairperson of the local rock…
-
Film Review: Donbass
★★★★☆ Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa frequently switches between found-footage documentaries, shorts and narrative features. With his latest, Donbass, Loznitsa blends aesthetic forms for a nightmarish mockumentary about nationalist identity and the often frightening daily occurrences and hardships dominating the Donbass region of the Ukraine. The distinct blurring between fact and fiction begins immediately with an actor sat…
-
Cannes 2018: Birds of Passage review
★★★★★ From the duo behind Embrace of the Serpent comes another extraordinary movie full of ethnographic detail and mystical symbolism. In Birds of Passage, a revenge tragedy plot involving the burgeoning market in weed is transformed into a riveting form of acid western. Set in the arid coastal Guajira region of Colombia, among an indigenous…
-
Film Review: Western
★★★★★ The expression goes “Home is where the heart is”, but in Valeska Grisebach’s terrific new film Western, home is somewhere to escape from in pursuit of fresh experiences, new opportunities, home is associated with painful memories and familial scars. As in the genre from which the film takes its name, Western takes place in…
-
Film Review: 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute)
★★★★☆ Making its world premiere last year at Cannes and walking off with the Grand Prix, Robin Campillo’s AIDS drama 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) is a skillfully woven and at times unbearably sad portrait of activists living, to quote a line in the film, “politics in the first-person”. 120 BPM gradually moves from its initial…
-
DVD Review: La Prisonnière
★★★★☆ Re-released on DVD and Blu-ray this week, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s final film, the S&M-themed La Prisonnière, is a riveting melodrama which shows up the Fifty Shades of Grey series for the Mumsnet version of kink that it is. Josée (Élisabeth Wiener), a television editor in a relationship with the older artist Gilbert (Bernard Fresson), one…
-
Film Review: Isle of Dogs
★★★★☆ Whatever happened to the humble canine being ‘man’s best friend’? This is exactly the question Wes Anderson poses in his sci-fi dystopian adventure Isle of Dogs. It’s a film that serves as a passionate reminder to us all that dogs rule, while also being a typically endearing, eccentric and inventive tale from the American filmmaker.…
-
Film Review: Thelma
★★★★☆ Joachim Trier’s unexpected foray into genre territory recalls the films of M. Night Shyamalan and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, giving the tale of a girl with weird powers an icy Scandinavian mood and a slow-going pace which feels like a walk in deep snow. Thelma is a genre-bending mystery drama running the gamut between…
-
Interview: S. Craig Zahler, dir. Brawl in Cell Block 99
American genre director S. Craig Zahler came to the attention of audiences and critics alike with his stunning 2015 horror western hybrid Bone Tomahawk. Zahler is back with another supremo slice of glorious B-movie pulp, in the form of Brawl in Cell Block 99. Martyn Conterio: How detailed are your scripts? I ask because you’re a…
-
Film Review: Brawl in Cell Block 99
★★★★☆ The second feature from S. Craig Zahler, Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a grisly saga about a brick shithouse mechanic turned drugs courier fighting for the lives of his wife and unborn child. Sent down after a deal goes wrong, Bradley’s troubles are just beginning.If 2015’s Bone Tomahawk, a Howard Hawks-type western spliced…
