Petite Maman | Movie review
This gracefully rendered, fabular tale provides an exquisite distillation of Céline Sciamma’s focused and empathetic cinematic style, and it amounts to the writer-director’s strongest work to date. The...
View ArticleWheel of Fortune and Fantasy | Movie review
Three lovelorn episodes about “coincidence and imagination”, as described by writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, comprise this wondrous, searching and loquacious film. Hamaguchi has spoken of his debt...
View ArticleLa Mif | Movie review
This excellent, if dramatically overburdened realist drama has the quality of texture: the lives of seven girls in social care are rendered by writer-director Fred Baillif in immediate, empathetic...
View ArticleOne of These Days | Movie review
A dramatic retelling of S R Bindler’s 1997 documentary Hands On A Hardbody, this solid, absorbing film fictionalises a publicity stunt at a car dealership in a small Texan town. Whichever participant...
View ArticleVortex | Movie review
Gaspar Noé, generally a director of provocations, has made an elegant and candid feature in a lesser-spotted minor key. The filmmaker has fashioned a cluttered and claustrophobic world – a couple of...
View ArticleMoon, 66 Questions | Movie review
This promising domestic drama about a young woman reconnecting with her ailing parent has an intelligent scene in which the former learns how to manoeuvre the debilitated patient, once her protector...
View Article“The world can change if you put together two things that were not associated...
Sara Fgaier brings her debut feature Weightless (Sulla terra legerri) to Locarno, where it has premiered in competition. It follows Gian (Andrea Renzi), an ageing man with amnesia who seeks to address...
View ArticleLocarno Film Festival 2024: Timestalker | Review
The riddle of reincarnation is the problem of repetition. No matter the place, no matter the age, no matter the body: the same thing will happen. You’ll make identical mistakes; you’ll fail to adapt to...
View ArticleLocarno Film Festival 2024: Bang Bang | Review
A boxer seeks redemption: an oldie and a goodie. Tim Blake Nelson takes on the worn mantle of the broken, irascible ex-pro fallen on hard times. He plays “Bang Bang” Rozyski, a Detroit legend who won...
View ArticleVenice Film Festival 2024: Weightless | Review
Artists often wrestle with the conundrum: how to give form to grief? How to give it contours, shape? Sophocles had Elektra to express the feelings of rage and deception conjured by loss. CS Lewis...
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