Film reviews and more
Coming from a background in photography and cinematography, Alejandro Loayza Grisi embarked on his directorial career with Utama, the tale of an elderly Quechua couple wrangling llamas in the Bolivian highlands.
Anchored by one of the finest lead performances of any British film in recent memory, Aleem Khan’s feature debut, After Love, sees Joanna Scanlan as a woman whose very identity is crumbling around her, after a bombshell revelation causes her to reassess her whole life and very reason for being.
Perhaps better-known for his work fronting the New York art band BODEGA, Ben Hozie is also a director of stylistically-daring documentaries and independent films that centre around the unusual lives of artists and societal outcasts.
This sophomore effort from Hong Khaou stars Henry Golding as Kit, a British Vietnamese man returning to his birth-land for the first time to scatter his parents’ ashes. Monsoon sketches the geographical and emotional contours of such a journey, steering between the cacophonous traffic of Ho Chi Minh and the restless, internal tides of memory and mourning.
It’s been over a decade since British indie director Thomas Clay had a new film set for release. After 2008’s Soi Cowboy, Clay spent time researching the English interregnum: exploring its political and social upheavals to find an untold story buried within a less frequently mined period of history.
Since his 1997 feature Ossos began his work with the disadvantaged communities of Fontainhas in Lisbon, Pedro Costa has become one of cinema’s most singular voices on the dispossessed.
Having already topped many end-of-year lists in territories blessed with an earlier release schedule – not long after becoming the first-ever Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes – the hype for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is very real and richly deserved.
British filmmaker Shola Amoo returns to screens this week with his sophomore effort The Last Tree. The coming-of-age tale tells the story of Femi, a Nigerian boy fostered in Lincolnshire who struggles to reconnect with his culture after he moves in with his biological mother.
Alison Klayman made her name as a film-maker with 2012’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a close study of the revered Chinese artist which followed him across the course of several years, leading up to his eventual arrest in Beijing in 2011.
Mumblecore legend Andrew Bujalski’s latest film, Support the Girls, headed by the singularly brilliant Regina Hall, tells the story of a group of young women working at a Hooters-style bar in Texas. We sat down with the film’s director to discuss empathy, understanding, and the liminal spaces of the highway-dominated world in which the film is set.
In 2015, Brady Corbet went from supporting roles in films like Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (US) and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, to suddenly being lauded as one of the most exciting new directors working in American Cinema.
Zheng Kai is one of China’s biggest actors, but in the West he’s hardly known. Promoting his latest film, Shadow, a visually striking period action epic from Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero, The House of Flying Daggers and The Great Wall, Zheng is hoping that all that is about to change.