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Cinema Made in Italy 2020 highlights
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, Cinema Made in Italy returned to London this month to showcase a surfeit of contemporary Italian cinema. New films were screened from 4-9 March, in addition to a special screening of Liliana Cavani’s 1974 psychological erotic classic, The Night Porter. Cinema Made in Italy took place at the Ciné Lumière, hosted by…
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Film Review: Calm with Horses
★★★★☆ “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. Arm was once a boxer…
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Film Review: Bacurau
★★★☆☆ 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 intertextual genre movie it most…
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Film Review: And Then We Danced
★★★★★ 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 is a pulsing drama about…
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Interview: Pedro Costa, dir. Vitalina Varela
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.
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Film Review: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
★★★★☆ 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 absolutely vital that we recall…
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Film Review: Vitalina Varela
★★★★★ 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 delight devotees of Costa’s earlier…
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Film Review: The Wild Goose Lake
★★★★☆ 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 a copper at a roadblock,…
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Film Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
★★★★☆ 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, Céline Sciamma has crafted a…
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Film Review: The Invisible Man
★★★★☆ 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 on when you start counting,…
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