★★★☆☆ Mr. Jones isn’t just middlebrow – it’s the middle of the middlebrow: core-brow; nucleus-brow. Agnieszka Holland’s lengthy but invariably engaging new film concerns the real-life story of Welsh reporter Gareth Jones’ journey to Moscow and Ukraine in 1933 and his discovery there of the Holodomor – otherwise known as Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Juliette Binoche’s character Anne rides the Paris metro and is spat at by a young man with darker skin. In Bas Devos’ Hellhole, Alba Rohrwacher’s character rides the underground in Brussels and looks on as armed police survey her fellow passengers, who also have darker Continue Reading
★★★★☆ At an early point in The Souvenir, the protagonist explains that filmmaking is, for her, a form of therapy. The Souvenir itself might be a form of therapy for Joanna Hogg, who wrote and directed it and has since said that she based her script directly on her own Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Angela Schanelec’s latest film I Was at Home, But opens on some reassuring farmyard animals. A dog chases a rabbit. Another dog lies sleeping. A donkey looks out the window of a weathered old house. Life is simple and time is slow. More than you can say, however, for Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In Monos, a diverse group of hormonal teenage soldiers man an isolated outpost during an unseen war. Their station is a misty mountaintop dotted with monolithic concrete structures. It is said to be somewhere in Colombia but could easily be mistaken for the Scottish highlands. They’re tasked with watching Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The seemingly unlikely tale of how Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove got greenlit, funded and selected for competition at the Berlinale warrants further investigation. The German-Turkish director of The Cut and In The Fade has never shied away from hot button topics, nor has he ever beat around the Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Hans Petter Moland is a peculiarity: a Norwegian born and based filmmaker of unmistakably American genre sensibilities. His 2014 film In Order of Disappearance was a darkly comic western revenge flick with more than a little of the Coen brothers about it – not least in the character played by Continue Reading
The 69th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival kicks off this week (7-17 February) with Lone Scherfig’s The Kindness of Strangers, a “modern-day fairytale about hope, forgiveness and love” starring Andrea Riseborough, Bill Nighy, Caleb Landry Jones, Jay Baruchel, Tahar Rahim and Zoe Kazan. Given the announcement in late Continue Reading
Radu Muntean has spent the last 13 years making films that examine the stranger undercurrents in Romanian society, particularly the way in which ordinary people react in extraordinary situations. He’s regarded as having been one of the leading lights of the Romanian New Wave although he’d probably grit his teeth Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The selection for this year’s Cannes Film Festival seemed to suggest that gritty reality was back on the cards, with a surprise piece of social realism screening on opening night. Todd Haynes’ first feature in seven years feels like an overwhelming retaliation to all that. Beautifully adapted from Patricia Continue Reading