Patrick Gamble
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Berlin 2015: ‘Every Thing Will Be Fine’ review
★★☆☆☆ In Wim Wenders’ facile return to narrative filmmaking, Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), all of life’s problems can easily be resolved by a good old-fashioned hug. Loaded with unremarkable statements on moral resolve and brimming with arrogance, this desultory study of grief and the need for an artist to suffer in order to…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Counting’ review
★★★★☆ Jem Cohen is perhaps best-known to UK audiences for his tenderly observant drama Museum Hours (2012). A comparable romantic outlook on the world and similarly intimate themes of urban identity are intermingled with much larger social concerns in his latest film essay, Counting (2015). A free-wheeling travelogue told across fifteen chapters, Cohen’s latest is…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories’ review
★★★☆☆ A luminous critique of the rising tide of consumerism engulfing South East Asia , director Phan Dang Di’s Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories (2015) contrasts the arresting natural beauty of the Vietnamese countryside with the gaudy neon-lit humidity of Saigon during the dawning of the new millennium. A visually opulent and highly…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Angelica’ review
★★☆☆☆ Director Mitchell Lichtenstein achieved cult veneration with Teeth (2007), a idiosyncratic body horror about a young fundamentalist Christian who develops a gynaecological abnormality that she turns to her advantage in order to ward of the threat of male violence. He returns to these well-trodden themes of female sexual repression in his ludicrously ostentatious and…
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Film Review: ‘Coherence’
★★★☆☆ Western narratives have long been fascinated with fate, beguiled by those moments in the past where a decision irrevocably changes the direction of our lives. These points of divergence can seem insignificant, whilst others stay with you forever. It’s the lasting memories of compunction that form the basis of James Ward Byrkit’s cerebral debut…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Under Electric Clouds’ review
★★★☆☆ Filming for Berlinale competition offering Under Electric Clouds (2015) began in 2011 before director Aleksei German Jr. put the production on hiatus so he could finish his late father’s final film, Hard to Be a God (2012). Having never experienced enlightenment, the alien planet of Hard to Be a God was caught in an…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Jia Zhangke, a Guy from Fenyang’ review
★★★★☆ In 1998, Walter Salles brought Central Station (1998) to the Berlinale and came home with the Golden Bear. It was here that Salles met Jia Zhangke, a then relatively unknown Chinese director premièring his debut film Xiao Wu (1997). Salles, like many others, was enthralled by Jia’s singular style and unique brand of social…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Body’ review
★★★☆☆ Małgorzata Szumowska has become a regular at the Berlinale. Both Strangers (2004) and Elles (2012) appeared in the festival’s Forum strand while in 2013 she won the Teddy Award for In the Name Of (2013), her uneven though novel examination of homosexuality within the Catholic church. With Body (2015), Szumowska presents us with three…
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Berlin 2015: ‘Queen of Earth’ review
★★★★☆ A chamber piece constructed in pallid pastel shades, Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (2015) marks a tonal if not thematic departure from the precocious misanthropy of last year’s well-received Listen Up Philip (2014). A feminist exploration of jealously contained within the lurid overtones of a domestic horror, the passive aggression gradually gives way…
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Berlin 2015: ‘The Pearl Button’ review
★★★★☆ Arriving at the Berlinale with another probing examination into Chile’s harrowing past, The Pearl Button (2015) makes for a fitting diptych to Patricio Guzmán’s previous documentary, Nostalgia for the Light (2012). Whilst the focus may have shifted, Guzmán continues to gaze at the stars in search of answers, yet uses water as his motif…