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Film Review: Donbass
★★★★☆ Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa frequently switches between found-footage documentaries, shorts and narrative features. With his latest, Donbass, Loznitsa blends aesthetic forms for a nightmarish mockumentary about nationalist identity and the often frightening daily occurrences and hardships dominating the Donbass region of the Ukraine. The distinct blurring between fact and fiction begins immediately with an actor sat…
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Cannes 2018: Birds of Passage review
★★★★★ From the duo behind Embrace of the Serpent comes another extraordinary movie full of ethnographic detail and mystical symbolism. In Birds of Passage, a revenge tragedy plot involving the burgeoning market in weed is transformed into a riveting form of acid western. Set in the arid coastal Guajira region of Colombia, among an indigenous…
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Cannes 2018: Wildlife review
★★★☆☆ There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine actor Paul Dano turns his hand to directing in Wildlife, which opened the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Dano’s directorial debut is a sincere and often handsome portrait of American suburban melancholia. It’s 1960: a “heck…
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Film Review: Everybody Knows
★★★☆☆ Three years on from The Salesman, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi returns with his mystery-thriller Everybody Knows, boasting an attractive trio of Latin performances from Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darín and Penélope Cruz in a compelling drama concerning lost loves and family ties. The opening scene lingers in the dilapidated belfry of a provincial Spanish church where…
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Cannes 2018: Our picks of the festival
The red carpet unrolls, the paparazzi mount their step ladders, and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina kiss above the Palais du Cinema under an azure sky. The talk in the build up to 71st Cannes Film Festival has been far less sunny. The controversial face-off with Netflix and the banning of selfies on the red carpet…
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DVD Review: Intimate Lighting
★★★★☆ Despite being relatively light on political content, Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting – re-released on DVD and Blu-ray this week – was banned for twenty years under Soviet rule but has since become an enduring favourite of the Czech New Wave. One of the few directors of the Czech New Wave not to come out…
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Film Review: Tully
★★★☆☆ Jason Reitman’s career has been on an odd trajectory since he smashed into the mainstream with his 2008 teen classic Juno. Since then he’s produced Academy Award bait (Up in the Air), Nicholas Sparks-style schmaltz (Labor Day), and outright trash (Men, Women and Children). In the midst of this tonal and qualitative vacillation, he…
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Film Review: Lean on Pete
★★★★★ British director Andrew Haigh follows up the brilliant 45 Years and Weekend with another understated masterpiece, Lean on Pete, about a young man’s odyssey across America with his horse. Haigh demonstrates impressive versatility by moving from a drama about the collapsing marriage of a middle-class retired couple in genteel rural England, to one about…
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Interview: Andrew Haigh, dir. Lean on Pete
After the success of both Weekend and 45 Years, British director Andrew Haigh now turns his attention to America, with Lean on Pete. To mark the film’s release we caught up with the talented young filmmaker to discuss this challenging adaptation, loneliness, and working with horses.
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Criterion Review: Metropolitan
★★★★☆ In Manhattan, a circle of wealthy young socialites party, gossip and generally congratulate themselves while the self-styled intellectual Tom (Edward Clements) reluctantly joins the group. Riffing on Noel Coward and Woody Allen, and prefiguring the preppy urban cinema of Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman’s directorial debut is a terrifically satirical portrayal of the upper echelons…
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