Patrick Gamble
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DVD Review: El Sur
★★★★★ Heralded by Pedro Almodóvar as “one of the best in Spanish cinema history”, Victor Erice’s El Sur is re-released on DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the BFI. Best known for his spellbinding debut Spirit of the Beehive, Erice’s follow-up also uses the recollection of childhood to explore the psychological scars of the Spanish Civil…
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Film Review: Godless
★★★☆☆ Ralitza Petrova’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Godless is the latest in an outpouring of punishing portraits of life in the New East. Rigidly conforming to the stark, unforgiving aesthetic now synonymous with post-soviet social realism, Petrova’s debut is a gruelling exploration of the new political and cultural identities being forged in Bulgaria following the…
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Film Review: Baden Baden
★★★☆☆ Rachel Lang’s Baden Baden is a simple story of an aimless woman returning to her hometown and building a new shower stall for her grandmother. Not much else happens in terms of traditional plot, yet this arthouse oddity is an impossibly fragile and emotionally robust drama about identity, positioned on a razor’s edge between…
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Film Review: The Land of the Enlightened
★★★☆☆ In this his debut film, Belgian photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue blends fiction and documentary to locate a deeper truth in Afghanistan’s tortured history of invasion and occupation. A cinematic voyage across the arid Afghan hinterlands, The Land of the Enlightened tells the story of a group of young boys whose lives have been forever…
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FrightFest 2016: Shelley review
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s striking debut Shelley is a Gothic horror that uses degeneration of the body to explore the exploitation of migrant workers and the individualist ideology that accompanies society’s growing obsession with ‘organic’ living. A young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan), arrives in the Danish countryside to work as a housekeeper for Louise (Ellen…
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Film Review: Lights Out
★★★☆☆ The fear of the dark is a common phobia that stems from a fear of the unknown; those unexplainable bumps in the night and the monsters hiding under the bed. The darkness, and the ghouls lurking within it, have provided the foundations for many a horror film, but rarely has it been employed as…
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Odessa 2016: Ali and Nino review
★★★☆☆ Ali and Nino marks an unexpected return to fiction filmmaking for Asif Kapadia. A tale of impossible love set against the backdrop of the First World War and the subsequent independence movement in Azerbaijan, Kapadia’s adaptation of Kurban Said’s pseudonymous classic is a film of tremendous beauty but very little heart. The film’s titular…
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Odessa 2016: Illegitimate review
★★★★☆ Can time heal all wounds, or are certain indiscretions immune to the sympathetic ebb and flow of life? That’s the quandary posed in Illegitimate, the eye-catching incest drama from Romanian director Adrian Sitaru. Despite tackling one of society’s last remaining taboos, Illegitimate avoids sensationalism, presenting the topic of sibling incest in an earnest and…
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Odessa 2016: House of Others review
★★★★☆ If there was an award for best newcomer in world cinema then Georgia would be a great outside bet. In recent years, films like Rusudan Chkonia’s Keep Smiling, Levan Koguashvili’s Blind Dates and Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’ In Bloom have emerged from the Caucus region to resounding acclaim. Rusudan Glurdjidze’s haunting drama House of…
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Odessa 2016: Death by Death review
★★★☆☆ The fear of dying is the impetus behind Xavier Seron’s Death by Death, an Oedipal dramedy that positions itself between the two known truths of life and death. A bold and electrifying study of the dysfunctional relationship between a middle-aged hypochondriac and his dying mother, Seron’s feature-debut is an exceedingly dark, albeit frequently hilarious…