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Berlin 2018: Yours in Sisterhood review
★★★☆☆ 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 in New York Magazine, before becoming the first ever mainstream feminist magazine in the US,…
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Berlin 2018: An Elephant Sitting Still review
★★★★☆ 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 individualism. Under the perpetually grey sky of a run-down industrial town in northern China, Hu…
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Berlin 2018: L’Animale review
★★★★☆ 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 heart soon take precedence over a graduation diploma in this charming, precise lesson about…
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Berlin 2018: Lemonade review
★★★★☆ 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 better in the ‘Land of the Free’. Arriving almost a decade after her contribution to…
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Berlin 2018: The Green Fog review
★★★★☆ 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 Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo. Commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival, but born out of…
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Berlin 2018: Watch premiering titles online with Festival Scope
This year, for the very first time the Berlinale is offering a handpicked selection of films for special festival screenings online. This joint project with online digital platform Festival Scope is intended to reach Berlinale fans who are unable to attend the festival in person. The special festival programming offer serves to acknowledge the interest…
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DVD Review: The Housemaid
★★☆☆☆ In the midst of the First Indochina War in Vietnam, a young woman, Linh (Kate Nhung), arrives at a French colonial rubber plantation in search of work. The plantation owner, Captain Sebastien Laurent (Jean Michel Richaud) seems kindly, but it’s not long before the supernatural secrets of the plantation begin to manifest. On its…
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DVD Review: The Colour of Pomegranates
★★★★☆ A remastered re-release of Soviet film director and artist Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, courtesy of specialist distributors Second Sight, is an opportunity to rediscover a unique cinematic experience. Cinema has not treated poetry particularly well. Either we get faithful reproductions of inciting incidents, or biopics dosed with out of focus shots of…
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Film Review: Die Tomorrow
★★★★☆ If you found out you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do? Cinema has often looked to stories of the dead as a way of making sense of the living, but rarely do we ever choose to confront our own mortality head-on. Not Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, whose Die Tomorrow merges various…
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Baftas 2018: Three Billboards wins Best Film, Guillermo del Toro is Best Director
Hosted by Joanna Lumley, tonight’s Baftas ceremony saw – as predicted – a reasonably even spread of winners. Best Film went to Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, while The Shape of Water helmer Guillermo del Toro received the award for Best Director. Best Actress went to Frances McDormand (Three Billboards), Best Actor to Gary…
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