Film Reviews
LFF 2014: Winter SleepSunday, 19 October 2014
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is an epic chamber piece by a contemporary great. From the moment a stone suddenly smashes the car window of landlord Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), physical threat darkens the corners of the remote Anatolian hotel-home he shares with his bitter, bored sister Necla (Demet Akbao) and young, emotionally dying wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen). Read more... |
LFF 2014: Margarita, With A StrawSaturday, 18 October 2014
In the vein of My Left Foot, Inside I’m Dancing and Gaby: A True Story, Margarita, With A Straw focuses on living a full life with cerebral palsy. Laila (Kalki Koechlin) is a young woman who lives in Delhi with her supportive and loving family. Despite ructions between mother (Revanthi) and daughter, Laila’s life is pretty good. Growing up is another matter and after one particular embarrassment, she takes on an opportunity to study in New York City. Read more... |
LFF 2014: A Little ChaosSaturday, 18 October 2014
Alan Rickman returns to film directing 17 years after he first stepped behind the camera with a film as pulpy and bodice-ripping as his debut feature, The Winter Guest, was chilly and austere. Visually enticing and packed with a blue-chip international array of actors, several of whom have precious little to do, A Little Chaos addresses a preferred English topic (gardens and gardening) displaced to some mighty elegant French environs. Read more... |
LFF 2014: FoxcatcherFriday, 17 October 2014
There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of David Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion. Top athletes need patrons and Schultz’s brother Mark (a truly exquisite performance by Channing Tatum) thought he’d found his in John E. Read more... |
LFF 2014: MommyFriday, 17 October 2014
Motherly love is stretched to its very limits in Xavier Dolan’s deeply affecting melodrama. It's pitched to perfection and shot in a claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio, which is occasionally opened up to evoke a rush of liberating joy. This stylish and emotionally charged cinematic experience marks out the maturing of one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Read more... |
The JudgeThursday, 16 October 2014
The Judge is the Chaka Khan of movies: it’s every movie, it’s all in here. Directed by comedy specialist David Dobkin, there were high hopes for this first outing from Team Downey, Robert Jr & Susan Downey's production company. To ensure excitement, Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s script has enough plot for five films: The Judge is a crime drama, court thriller, family melodrama, bromance, romance and comedy. Read more... |
LFF 2014: PhoenixThursday, 16 October 2014
Director Christian Petzold avoided Germany’s grim version of heritage cinema – the war, the Wall – until last year’s Cold War hit Barbara. Read more... |
Björk: Biophilia LiveWednesday, 15 October 2014
From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The Keeping RoomWednesday, 15 October 2014
Indie actress Brit Marling takes aim at a rigid power structure in this tense and pared down female-led revisionist Western from British director Daniel Barber. Set towards the end of the American Civil war three women are grappling to survive and make sense of it all whilst the men battle it out and the world around them is burning to the ground. Read more... |
LFF 2014: It FollowsTuesday, 14 October 2014
Few films this frightening are also so kind. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature starts with a pretty teenage girl suffering inexplicable, bone-snapping terror. He makes us wait to find out why, lingering in the lives of 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends in their deliberately timeless, golden, Spielbergian suburbs. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Goodbye to LanguageMonday, 13 October 2014
Jean-Luc Godard is still masterfully riding new waves, more than 50 years after Breathless. Following Film Socialisme’s epic engagement with digital cinema, here 3D becomes a dazzling illusionist’s trick. Goodbye to Language drew laughs when I saw it for sheer chutzpah, but also in the way Georges Melies elicited gasps at cinema’s birth. Read more... |
Cathedrals of CultureMonday, 13 October 2014
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Wild TalesMonday, 13 October 2014
Argentine cinema is best known for its serious side – finely-honed arthouse fare from the likes of Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero and Lisandro Alonso. But the Argentines can do mainstream very well. And this is a big, bold, glossily-produced, highly entertaining black comedy – a collection of stand-alone stories connected by the theme of revenge, the practice of which is lent one spectacular expression after another. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The CutSaturday, 11 October 2014
There have been pitifully few films about the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in World War One, surely thanks to the strategic usefulness of a modern Turkey which denies the genocide’s existence. Fatih Akin, the fierce German-Turkish director of Head On, doesn’t limit The Cut to its direct horrors either, preferring to sweep away his hero Nazaret (Tahir Rahim) on wider historical currents. Read more... |
LFF 2014: Listen Up PhilipSaturday, 11 October 2014
Listen Up Philip is so successful in its retro stylings that it comes across like a lost New Hollywood gem. Read more... |
LFF 2014: The Duke of BurgundyFriday, 10 October 2014
Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M. Read more... |
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