independent cinema
DVD: Computer ChessFriday, 10 January 2014
In one of the extras on the DVD release of Computer Chess, director Andrew Bujalski explains that the film came about after he realised how to marry two ideas which he had been conjuring with for a while: a then undeveloped interest in the period... Read more... |
The Missing PictureFriday, 03 January 2014
History has been told in many ways on film, but Rithy Panh achieves something new, something unique and unsettling, in The Missing Picture. It’s the story of his native Cambodia, specifically the years from 1975, when the Khmer Rouge occupied the... Read more... |
SilenceTuesday, 06 August 2013
A taciturn, bearded Irishman leaves Berlin to return to his homeland. He’s travelling there to record silence. Arriving in Donegal, he wanders the countryside with a microphone trying to capture an environment where sounds made by humans do not... Read more... |
The Woody Allen story: 'Why do I feel like I got screwed?'Monday, 22 July 2013
Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of... Read more... |
WadjdaWednesday, 17 July 2013
In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both... Read more... |
The ComedianFriday, 31 May 2013
The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The... Read more... |
The StokerFriday, 17 May 2013
Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume... Read more... |
ShellTuesday, 12 March 2013
As a finely drawn portrayal of loneliness and solitude encouraged by bottled-up emotions, Shell would be noteworthy enough. But it also contains two scenes – father and daughter interactions - that are deeply uncomfortable viewing. First-time... Read more... |
SmashedMonday, 10 December 2012
“Cringed” is the adjective you want to invent to describe Kate, the dipso heroine of James Ponsoldt’s Smashed who's played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. If there’s one thing that Ponsoldt's script, co-written with Susan Burke, captures - actually,... Read more... |
DVD: Corpo CelesteMonday, 10 September 2012
The onset of puberty is difficult, and especially so for girls in art house films. Marta is 12 and has been away from Italy for 10 years. In the days after returning with her mother and sister, she contends with being prepared for her first... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Sundance LondonSunday, 29 April 2012
This weekend Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute are bringing a sort of taster version of the world’s leading showcase for independent (non-studio) English-language films to London. No one’s going to mistake Greenwich’s O2 Centre for an... Read more... |
Interview: Whit Stillman, Metropolitan FilmmakerWednesday, 25 April 2012
Unlike the New Seekers, Whit Stillman does not want to teach the world to sing. He does, however, want to teach it to dance, specifically to dance the Sambola (or, to give it its full name, Sambola! The New International Dance Craze). Instructions... Read more... |
