Search results for: “label/Film Festivals”
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Film Review: The Man From Mo’Wax
★★★★☆ The rise, fall and eventual rise again of James Lavelle, vinyl junkie turned trailblazing record label producer and creative figurehead of musical outfit UNKLE, may be an overly familiar tale of the young ingénue who succumbs to his own bloated ego and lifestyle excesses. But what gives The Man From Mo’Wax character and depth, lifting…
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Film Review: Lost in France
★★★☆☆ Documentary filmmaker Niall McCann’s Lost in France is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for a group of mid-1990s bands and musicians borne from the influential Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground. Both an ode to the industrial Scottish city from which they hail and a lament on the changing face and decline of musical…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Big Gold Dream’ review
★★★☆☆ All set to find an appreciative audience on BBC Four’s long-running Storyville strand, Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream (2015) – which premièred at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival – takes a pleasant and interesting trip down memory lane, specifically to the late 1970s where punk and post-punk where making a…
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Interview: Desiree Akhaven, ‘Appropriate Behaviour’
“I love Curb Your Enthusiasm. I want to feel just as entitled as any rich, middle aged white man; that’s how entitled I want my protagonist to be.” Desiree Akhaven does not consider herself to be a political filmmaker. In her debut feature Appropriate Behaviour (2014), which she wrote and directed, she stars as Shirin,…
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Glasgow 2015: Ann Hui on new film ‘The Golden Era’
Ann Hui’s voice is an uncommon one in world cinema. Probably the most acclaimed of the Hong Kong New Wave directors, Hui began her career in the late 1970s in a film industry then dominated by kung fu movies. She continued to make films in Hong Kong for over thirty years, striking an almost impossible…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn’
★★★☆☆ Liv Corfixen’s My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2014) starts from the unfortunate position of being wide open to comparison with another behind-the-scenes peek, Eleanor Coppola’s Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). Where that film followed the incredible disasters that befell Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) shoot, this documents the far…
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Special Feature: BFI presents Věra Chytilová
“Form seemed to have gone rigid.” Few sentences or sentiments could better encapsulate the climate in which Věra Chytilová, Queen of the Czech New Wave, forged her boundary-pushing directorial career – or the spunky attitude with which she approached her craft. Perhaps most fittingly, they are her own words. Even before her cinematic education, she…
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Interview: Jessica Hausner on new film ‘Amour Fou’
With the release of her fourth feature film in 13 years Jessica Hausner continues the current flow of quietly antagonistic Austrian auteurs speaking truth against the powerful constructs of a bourgeois society that eats its own for sport and pleasure. After the success of 2009’s Lourdes she returns with Amour Fou (2014), a look at…
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DVD Review: ‘The Sacrament’
★★★★☆ Ti West is undoubtedly one of the most exciting directors of the American horror new wave. He works intuitively, re-thinking the rules of horror movies within established generic boundaries. While he may be known for his signature slow-burns, the label is actually emblematic of his broader working methods; he’s a thoughtful, passionate artist whose…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Insecure’ review
★★☆☆☆ Adèle Exarchopoulos’ return to Cannes following Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s Palme d’Or win might be the headline from Marianne Tardieu’s French thriller Insecure (2014), but the film itself sadly doesn’t reach the promise of what its star might attract. Exarchopoulos is, in fact, only in a handful of scenes, as we follow the…
