Category: Maximilian von Thun
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Film Review: A Private War
★★★★★ Matthew Heineman, best-known for his acclaimed documentaries Cartel Land and City of Ghosts, seamlessly makes the transition to fiction with the utterly absorbing and emotionally searing Marie Colvin drama A Private War. Anchored by a career-best performance from Rosamund Pike and flawless direction and storytelling by Heineman, A Private War - named after and based…
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Film Review: Vice
★★★★☆ When historians look back at the rise of populism and anti-establishment feeling in the early years of the 21st century, they will almost certainly ascribe it to two central events. The first is the Iraq War, and the loss of faith it engendered in the West’s moral standing and its basic competence. The second…
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Film Review: Colette
★★★☆☆ Director Wash Westmoreland’s latest film, based on a screenplay written jointly by himself, his late husband Richard Glatzer and British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, tells the timely story of the early 20th century female writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley). Plucked from her comfortable but sheltered countryside existence by pompous Parisian writer Willy (Dominic West), Colette…
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Film Review: Shoplifters
★★★★☆ Often compared in his distinctly Japanese minimalism to legendary compatriot Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda is a filmmaker whose graceful yet unfussy style contrasts with the knotty themes he has made it his trademark to tackle. Kore-eda’s films are dedicated to the dilemmas and tragedies of family life, from the loss of a child (Still Walking)…
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Film Review: The Price of Everything
★★★★★ Primarily centred around New York auction houses, art fairs and the colourful characters that frequent them, Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything certainly doesn’t hold back in its skewering of a contemporary art world defined far more by financial gain and status seeking than a genuine love of beauty. Khan leaves his subjects to…
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Film Review: Cold War
★★★★☆ There is a ruined church that appears twice in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War: once at the beginning and once at the end, which serves as an authentic counterpoint to the fake heritage the new communist government is trying to create. Lacking a roof and strewn with rubble, it nonetheless feels far more solid than the…
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Film Review: Distant Voices, Still Lives
★★★★☆ Filmed in two separate parts by Terence Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives explores his childhood and early adulthood in the Liverpool of the 1940s and 1950s through the characters of Tony (Dean Williams), his authoritarian father Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite), loving mother (Freda Dowie) and lively sisters Eileen (Angela Walsh) and Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne). Told…
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Film Review: The Guardians
★★★☆☆ Best-known for Of Gods And Men, a film about a group of lonely men in a monastery at a time of political conflict, Xavier Beauvois is back with The Guardians, a film about a group of lonely women on a farm at a time of political conflict. Jokes about self-plagiarism aside, The Guardians is…
