Film reviews and more
With Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick passing on the baton to former Locarno artistic director Carlo Chatrian from next year, no one knew quite what to expect from this year’s competition strand. In the end, it was […]
★★★★☆ Sixth generation director Wang Xiaoshuai returns to Berlin with a decade-spanning family drama set against some of the most turbulent events in recent Chinese history. At just over three-hours, So Long, My Son is an emotionally […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ Varda by Agnès contains the best parts of Agnès Varda: work, wit and wisdom. Though it does not reach the heights of her gloriously charming last film, Faces Places, it is still a cathartic, bittersweet […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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. […]
★★★★☆ Bait joins a recent spate of British films that have abandoned the cities to depict a countryside in crisis. But, unlike social-realist dramas like The Levelling, Dark River and God’s Own Country, Mark Jenkin’s wonderfully […]
★★★★☆ A pair of self-absorbed millennials are forced to confront the lack of originality behind their ideas in Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists, a dramatic comedy that asks the questions; who has the “right” to access culture […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]