CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★★★☆ “Violence,” – Douglas ‘The Arm’ muses – “is not always the work of hateful men. It’s just their way of making sense of the world”. Certainly, in director Nick Rowland’s astonishing, brutal feature debut, Calm with Horses, violence seems to be the only way of making sense of anything. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A joint effort between Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, Bacurau is an acid western depicting a ragtag group fighting back against the outsiders who wish to do them harm. Picture Howard Hawks’ classic Rio Bravo, only the heroes are tripping out on ayahuasca. A blood-soaked anti-imperialist fable and Continue Reading
★★★★★ In his third feature, Levan Akin makes traditional Georgian dance a boldly cinematic affair, combining the disciplined physicality of a dance film with the lingering gazes of a slow-burning love story. A perfect double bill for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, released last month, And Then We Danced Continue Reading
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. Through his Fontainhas trilogy (the aforementioned Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth) and beyond (Horse Money) Costa has created astonishing, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ timely documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist is a persuasive argument for rereading Morrison if you’ve already read her works – and if you haven’t, an imperative to get to it. If we’re not to be consumed by total despair in the era of Trump, it is Continue Reading
★★★★★ Portuguese director and cinéaste’s favourite Pedro Costa’s seventh feature – his first since 2014’s Horse Money – is a work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters. After premiering last year at the Locarno Film Festival, Vitalina Varela will Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Chinese director Diao Yi’nan’s first film in five years, The Wild Goose Lake is a gangster flick mainlining on pure fatalism and turns the tables on genre conventions and expectations. The result is an occasionally opaque but tremendously well-made melodrama. When mobster Zhou Zenong (Ge Hu) accidentally shoots down Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The lives of painters tend to be told with broad strokes. Famous artists are portrayed as tortured and romantic or else their work hangs over the story, weighing it down with a set of cultural expectations which are hard to shake off. With Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Moonlit waves crash against coastal rocks, the darkness punctured only by an amber light coming from the windows of a mansion sat atop the cliff above. It’s a neo-Gothic scene wholly worthy of the classic studio chillers, while the film’s title fades in a cool, 1990s-esque glassy font. Depending Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ An adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space, filmmaker Richard Stanley’s latest is a richly textured, if not entirely coherent, descent into madness, body horror and technological anxiety. After a meteorite crashes in the Gardner family farm their well is poisoned. One would be well-advised Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Michael Winterbottom brings together a who’s who of British comic talent for his fast fashion satire Greed. Conceived as a biting commentary on inequality, sweatshop labour and…well, greed, the film lacks fluency and laughs, rarely managing to lands its many upward punches. High street fashion magnate Sir Richard McCreadie Continue Reading
★★★★☆ An acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary, Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family chronicles one family’s privately run ambulance, saving lives and attempting to break-even during wee hours in Mexico City. What do you do when the ambulance chasers are other ambulances? This is the question posited by Midnight Family. Nine Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In her sixth feature, Austrian director Jessica Hausner brings an intense, minimalistic creepiness to this science fiction tale of floral manipulation. Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually striking satire of essentialist maternal instinct and the contemporary anxiety Continue Reading
Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds was published in 1952 in her collection The Apple Tree. Telling the story of a Cornish village besieged by marauding birds, it would be adapted several times for TV, film and radio, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name. Hitchcock’s Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Autumn de Wilde’s debut feature – and the fourth big-screen version of Jane Austen’s novel Emma – is a handsome and witty if slightly uninspiring adaptation buoyed by a surfeit of game British acting talent and a quite delightful turn from rising star Anya Taylor-Joy. De Wilde’s film serves Continue Reading
