Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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. […]
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, […]
★★★☆☆ Hackney-born actor, DJ and now filmmaker Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with Yardie, a Caribbean twist on the well-worn conventions of the British gangster movie, based on the book by Victor Headley. The film follows a Jamaican drug […]
★★★★☆ While Middle Eastern cinema seems to be having a fresh resurgence of late, films that shine a light on ordinary people in these countries remain few and far between. With an industry all but decimated by years of political […]
★★★☆☆ Training his eye on the 2017 memorial service held at Berlin’s Treptower Park, a site of pilgrimage for the Soviet diaspora, Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day is an absorbing study of nationalism and the collective memory of traumatic experiences. After the Second […]
★★★☆☆ A series of provocative and often heartbreaking conversations between the past and the present, Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood is a collective portrait of feminism, and a beautiful paean to the lost art of letter writing. Beginning as an insert […]
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent […]
★★★★☆ It’s not difficult to guess which beast is being referred to in the title of Katharina Mückstein’s coming-of-age drama L’Animale. In rural Austria, Mati (Sophie Stockinger) is only a few weeks away from passing her final exams. But matters of […]
★★★★☆ The theme of institutional corruption has become recognised as a mainstay of the Romanian New Wave, but Ioana Uricaru’s debut Lemonade, the story of a Romanian woman’s attempt to obtain a United States green card, suggests things aren’t much […]
★★★★☆ A veritable treasure trove for cinephiliacs, The Green Fog sees Guy Maddin and his Forbidden Room team use footage repurposed from movies and television shows shot or set exclusively in San Francisco to create a cinematic echo of Alfred […]