Patrick Gamble

★★★★☆ Ramin Bahrani has cultivated a reputation as a modern social realist, due in no small part to his striking ability to capture the pulse of marginalised America. His latest, 99 Homes (2014), is a humid Floridian thriller set during the 2008 US housing market collapse. Combining economics, class and wealth inequality to form a…

Continue

★★★★☆ Casting a peculiar spell over its audience, The Wonders (2014) is a rural ghost story masquerading as a coming-of-age tale. Unfolding like a morbid reverie for a bygone era, Alice Rohrwacher’s follow up to 2011’s Corpo Celeste reverberates with the strange frisson of a world pining for a reality that never existed in the…

Continue

★★★★☆ An Hitchcockian Berlin-set thriller, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014) hinges almost entirely on its sensational finale; a near-perfect coda to a film that employs acquainted genre tropes to unearth the malodorous remnants of memory and guilt in contemporary Germany. Petzold’s characters often find themselves in situations in which they must conceal a truth about themselves;…

Continue

★★★★★ Named by Susan Sontag as “the perfect film”, Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), rereleased on Blu-ray this week by the BFI, is an unsentimental billet-doux to Anna Karina, the director’s former wife and muse. Combining the aesthetics of cinéma vérité with an abundance of innovative techniques he would become renowned for pioneering, Godard’s…

Continue

★★★★☆ Harking back to the taut psychological thrillers of the late 1980s, where multiplex screens were littered with films calibrated towards adult audiences, Australian actor/director Joel Edgerton’s feature debut, The Gift (2015) is a welcome slice of intelligent entertainment. Produced by Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Company that, for better of worse, has reshaped the multiplex landscape,…

Continue

★★★★☆ A scathing symposium on the fallacy of a ‘post-racial’ America, Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014) aims to expose the myth that ‘racism is over’. At a time when the conversation concerning racism is roaring louder than ever, Simien’s acerbic comedy attempts to show what it means to be black in contemporary America. A…

Continue

★★☆☆☆ A loose remake of the 1973 José Giovanni film of the same name, Rachid Bouchareb’s Two Men in Town (2014) transplants the original’s critique of the French judicial system to New Mexico. Starring Forest Whitaker as a Muslim ex-con struggling to carve out an honest life, Bouchareb’s latest livens with the occasional moment of…

Continue

★★★★☆ Tales of impossible love and the trappings of fame and fortune have long been staples of Hollywood cinema. However, to accuse Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights (2014), a romantic melodrama about the human price of stardom, of being derivative would be to ignore the significance of its message. A rebuke to the misogyny of…

Continue

★★★☆☆ The anxiety of a nation in a state of schizophrenia is the catalyst behind director Christian Schwochow’s West (2013), a devastating portrait of a mother and son’s attempt to flee the GDR. Based on the quasi-biographical novel Lagerfeuer by Julia Franck, Schwochow’s Berlin-set, Cold War drama is a slow-burner that examines the fallacy of…

Continue

★★★☆☆ With 39 features to his name, each as unique and innovative as the next, there are few American directors who come close to matching the prolific career of Robert Altman. Ron Mann would go one step further, describing Altman’s films as distinctively “Altmanesque”, a term he spends 95 minutes attempting to define in his…

Continue