★★★☆☆ Notions of marginalisation, responsibility and the ambiguities of nature versus nurture all collide in Antoine Cuypers’ handsome and austere feature debut, Préjudice. The film is built around enormously compelling performances from Thomas Blanchard and Nathalie Baye, as an antagonistic son and mother. They take the leads in a taut Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ What keeps running but never gets anywhere? This riddle is posed on a number of occasions during writer-director Jonas Selber Augustsén’s head-scratcher of a debut feature. Gym-goers may answer slogging away on a treadmill but the principle could just as easily be applied to a film which is wickedly Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The bold and deeply felt symbolism of Federico García Lorca’s famous matrimonial drama, Blood Wedding, makes it ripe for cinematic treatment. There are rich thematic veins to be opened in the writer’s text and his beguiling visual motifs are screaming from the page to be fully realised on screen. Continue Reading
★★★★☆ How do you solve a problem like Farah? Principled, articulate but pig-headed, she is the whirlwind around whom Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid builds her remarkable debut feature. As I Open My Eyes is set in a very specific time and place: Tunis, summer 2010. It advocates the noble idealism, Continue Reading
The International Film Festival Rotterdam kicks off its 45th edition this evening with the world premiere of Dutch survival drama Beyond Sleep. Directed by Boudewijn Koole, it follows an ambitious geologist on a search for meteorites in Norwegian swampland. It will be followed by twelve days of eclectic cinema from Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Despite Putin’s ‘gay propaganda’ law banning the promotion of “non-standard sexual relations”, Liubov Lvova and Sergei Taramaev’s Winter Path (2013) somehow managed to gain a distribution licence from the Ministry of Culture – though its inconspicuous release and limited festival run tells a different story. Whilst by no means Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Yusup Razykov’s Shame (Styd, 2013) continues the Uzbekistani director’s sociopolitical critique of Russian society with a maritime tragedy that echoes the contentious Kursk submarine catastrophe, which resulted in the deaths of 118 sailors after Russian authorities purportedly refused Western aid. Within the Arctic Circle in a frozen coastal concave Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Winner of the Best Documentary prize at Karlovy Vary, Vitaly Mansky’s Pipeline (2013) explores the connections between those living along the route of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline through the abstractions and inferences of their everyday lives. Built in 1983, the pipeline in question runs from Western Siberia to Germany, supplying Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The debut feature from Natasha Merkulova, Intimate Parts (2013) is an acerbic and comedic exploration of attitudes towards sexuality amongst the intelligentsia of contemporary Russian society. Attempting to debunk the media conceived misconception that Russians don’t have sex, Intimate Parts tackles taboo subjects such as homosexuality, infidelity, promiscuity and Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Winner of the Grand Prix prize at this year’s Kinotavr Film Festival, Aleksandr Veledinskiy’s The Geographer Drank His Globe Away (2013) stars Konstantin Khabenskiy (most familiar to UK audiences for his lead role in Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch) and is based on the eponymous novel by Alexander Ivanovo. A Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The only Russian film to appear at Cannes this year, Taisia Igumentseva’s debut feature Bite the Dust (2013) confounded critics typically more accustomed to the solemn social realism of post-Soviet cinema. However, behind the film’s synthetic veneer of slapstick comedy lies a pertinent message about the apathy that blights Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Themes of distrust, obsession and revenge all combine to somewhat underwhelming effect in Kirill Serebrennikov’s Betrayal (2012), a downbeat and ironically passionless excursion into restrained melodrama. Blending some deft and weighty camerawork with an oblique narrative of bewildering twists and turns, Serebrannikov’s latest is an alluring, if tedious example Continue Reading
