Patrick Gamble
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Berlin 2019: God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya review
★★★☆☆ Teona Strugar Mitevska’s previous film When the Day Had No Name was a bleak exploration of the cultural tensions in Macedonia, demonstrating how a world built on violence will inevitably breed more violence. It was a bold, if flawed, dissection of macho culture in the Balkans, a theme she develops further in God Exists, Her…
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Berlin 2019: Earth review
★★★★☆ Highlighting the significant impact of mining and large-scale construction on the planet’s ecosystem, the latest film from documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter Earth is a powerful example of politically charged landscape filmmaking. A brief introduction underlines the extent to which mankind is now the most destructive force on the planet. Every year, 60 million tonnes of…
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Berlin 2019: Öndög review
★★★★☆ A beguiling drama laced with dry humour and lashings of spiritualism, Wang Quan’an’s Competition entry Öndög possesses a mysterious grandeur that should ensure it doesn’t leave the Berlinale empty-handed. Concerned with the mysteries surrounding life and death, Öndög opens with the discovery of a dead body and ends in coitus, with what initially feels…
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Berlin 2019: Monsters review
★★★☆☆ Following in the footsteps of Adina Pintilie’s controversial Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not, Marius Olteanu’s Monsters is a tragic saga that explores the social taboos surrounding sexual identity and female emancipation in modern-day Romania. It’s been over a decade since Tudor Giurgiu released the lesbian romance Love Sick. Since then, Romanian directors have…
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Berlin 2019: Fourteen review
★★★★☆ Fourteen, the follow-up to former Los Angeles Reader film critic Dan Sallitt’s incest drama The Unspeakable Act, is a subdued drama about a friendship ageing over time. A nuanced portrait of female camaraderie presented in all its messy complexity. Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling) have been best friends since they were 14.…
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2018 Filmfest Hamburg round-up
This year’s Filmfest Hamburg coincided with the city’s football derby. A fiercely contested match between the city’s two biggest clubs, the game was a fitting metaphor for a festival undergoing its own identity crisis. CineVue were in attendance, and we’ve run-down our five favourite films at the festival. It’s been seven years since the last…
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FEST – New Directors New Films Festival roundup
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right questions, they’ll think about you for days.” This was the advice of two-time Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi as he delivered a masterclass to a group of burgeoning filmmakers at this…
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IndieLisboa 2018: The Wild Boys review
★★★★☆ The debut feature from provocative French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico is a film of unadulterated artifice. An exhilarating and highly surreal tale of gender-warfare, The Wild Boys is a maximalist work of paperback eroticism that almost defies categorisation; a film that marries cinematic heritage with progressive ideas to create a genre and gender-bending work of…
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IndieLisboa 2018: DRVO (A Árvore) review
★★★★☆ An old man and a young boy meet by a dying tree. They’ve both taken different paths to get here, but somehow they share the same memories. A deeply affecting vision of the lost paradise of childhood, André Gil Mata’s DRVO is a hypnotic trawling of individual suffering against the backdrop of a war-torn…
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Interview: Sebastián Lelio, dir. A Fantastic Woman
One of the biggest names to emerge from Chile’s new golden era of cinema, Sebastián Lelio first achieved international recognition with his fourth film Gloria, a dynamic comedy-drama about a middle-aged woman’s ill-fated romance with a retired naval officer. This week marks the release of his hugely anticipated follow-up A Fantastic Woman, a brazenly expressive…