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KVIFF 2018: Our festival highlights
Radu Jude’s film claimed the top prize at this year’s festival and it’s easy to understand why. It embraces the kind of boldly political stance of classic Polish cinema from the Communist era like a riff on both Wajda and Zanussi. The result is a formally loose, but dizzyingly dense and morally forthright examination of…
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KVIFF 2018: Winter Flies review
★★★★☆ Olmo Omerzu’s follow-up to 2015’s Family Film is another tale of children left to their own devices by negligent parents, but this time takes the form of winning road movie caper Winter Flies. The title perhaps refers to resolute dipterans that have refused to be cowed by seasonal colder weather and are attempting to make…
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Film Review: Happy as Lazzaro
★★★★☆ Alice Rohrwacher returns with her remarkable third film about a rural Italian community. Happy as Lazzaro sparkles with soul, enchantment and introspection – it’s no wonder that it took the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes last year. What starts as a relatively straightforward story takes a surprising, gripping turn into a timeless tale of…
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KVIFF 2018: Profile review
★★★☆☆ Timur Bekmambetov’s new thriller Profile seeks to explore the murky world of how social media is used to recruit vulnerable young women to ISIS. The results are as compelling as they are silly. Back when the entirely desktop-based Unfriended was released in 2014, Bekmambetov was candid about wanting to expand the conceit into an…
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Film Review: Burning
★★★★☆ Lee Chang-dong’s Burning features red-hot actor Yoo Ah-in (as Jong-su), Steven Yeun (as Ben) and newcomer Jeon Jong-seo (as Hae-mi) in an intricate thriller that switches between the wealthy Gangnam neighbourhood and farmlands just outside Paju, a city south of the Demilitarised Zone. While a social commentary on class divides and politics flickers quietly…
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KVIFF 2018: I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians review
★★★★☆ Following 2015’s Aferim!, Radu Jude returns to the topic of historical Romanian anti-Semitism in his furious new satire “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” which picked up the top prize at the 53rd edition of Karlovy Vary. Where Aferim! was a shaggy-dog road trip through 19th century Wallachia, Barbarians…
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DVD Review: Allure
★★☆☆☆ Laura (Evan Rachel Wood) is working for her father’s cleaning company when she meets 16-year-old Eva (Julie Sarah Stone) at one of her jobs. Eva is frustrated with her controlling mother, and so spotting a vulnerability, Laura begins grooming the teenager. Evan Rachel Wood is no stranger to playing vulnerable, damaged young women, from…
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Interview: Johanna St Michaels, dir. The Inertia Variations
Johanna St Michaels is a writer and director whose films Penthouse North and The Islands Amid The World explore the effects of time on people and places that slowly become neglected. Her latest film, The Inertia Variations, is her most personal to date.
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FEST – New Directors New Films Festival roundup
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right questions, they’ll think about you for days.” This was the advice of two-time Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi as he delivered a masterclass to a group of burgeoning filmmakers at this…
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Film Review: Vagabond
★★★★★ Back in UK cinemas to mark a BFI retrospective of the French New Wave director, Agnès Varda’s acclaimed 1985 road movie Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, is a veritable masterwork from one of our greatest living filmmakers. A scruffy-looking girl sits in a field. It’s winter. She attempts to eat part of a baguette. But doing proves…
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