Sydney Film Festival 2016
MOVIE REVIEW
The Commune (2016)
The Copenhagen of the 1970s lurked groovily over the horizon like a seven-day saturnalia to anyone peering toward the source of all the noise from the wrong side of the North Sea at the time. But Thomas Vinterberg revisits the environment of his childhood in “The Commune” and is careful to make it seem brittle, awkward and potentially corrosive to domestic harmony, full of the same misjudged fumblings toward happiness as everywhere else. Based primarily on a play by Mr. Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov and more distantly on the director’s own experiences, its characters are either helplessly insensitive or just hard of thinking, as well as adrift in an ocean of beige.
Continue reading “Peace, Free Love and Understanding” »
2015 Busan International Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
The Virgin Psychics (2016)
Sion Sono’s gonzo gangster-cannibal-hip-hop fantasia “Tokyo Tribe” had its tongue in its cheek and death on its mind; “The Virgin Psychics” puts mortality to one side and gives Eros its day, but without feeling the need to calm down. Originally a manga by Kiminori Wakasugi (and already brought to TV by Mr. Sono in 2013 with a bunch of the same actors as here), it’s a relentlessly ribald sci-fi burlesque about a group of young virgins with shared prenatal connections who all acquire lascivious superpowers at the same time. They then get caught up in a particularly carnal version of the end of the world on loan from some cheapo 1970s porn parody – which for all the resulting difficulties certainly looks like more fun than the Midwich Cuckoos ever got up to.
Continue reading “Dickman & Throbbin Ride Again” »
2016 Sundance Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
A Flag Without a Country (2016)
Bahman Ghobadi’s new sort-of documentary “A Flag Without a Country” declares itself to be scripted from the lives of its subjects, making it a spiritual cousin of “No One Knows About Persian Cats” – his 2009 film about two Iranian musicians trying to leave the country – which blurred the distinctions between invented characters and nonactors playing themselves into a continuous smudge. It worked then in urban Iran, and it works again now in beleaguered Kurdistan, where a much thinner helping of anything resembling a narrative is balanced by wider humanitarian concerns. “Flag” and “Cats” may share some kindred drollery, but it feels like Mr. Ghobadi has found a suitably fissile material for his method in the faces of Kurdish children scanning a horizon only just far enough away to conceal the ISIS fighters hurrying toward them, as if the interlocking sadnesses of northern Iraq were now dense enough for documentary truth to become bent by gravity on its way out.
Continue reading “It’s Time to Listen; It’s Time to Fight” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Imposter (2012)
Erik Wilson/Indomina Releasing
San Antonio, Texas, in 1994, mischievous 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared without a trace. For three years his family pined for him, searching, praying and holding out hope that he would one day be found alive and well. Then the seemingly miraculous happened as Nicholas appeared in Spain — afraid and alone, the apparent victim of a child prostitution ring. Except “Nicholas” was not whom he claimed to be and so transpires an utterly beguiling and completely baffling journey into the psyche of serial impersonator and eccentric con man Frédéric Bourdin.
Continue reading “Home Truths Will Out” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Pusher (2012)
Vertigo Films
After biding his time for 16 years, Nicolas Winding Refn seems to have sprung into action and lent his name to variants of his original "Pusher" film across Europe in an attempt to corner the market. Hence his executive producer credit on "Black's Game," a vibrant and darkly engaging story of Icelandic drug dealers at the turn of the millennium; and almost simultaneously the same credit on the new British remake of "Pusher" itself, from which anything engaging and vibrant seem to have been ruthlessly purged.
Continue reading “Blamespotting” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Last Circus (2010)
Diego López Calvín/Tornasol Films
Staking an immediate claim as the most delirious cinematic fever of whichever year it may eventually see the light of day, "The Last Circus" is unhinged. Directed by Álex de la Iglesia in a style which knows no restraint, it sets off at a mad sprint through a borderline-tasteless allegory of the Spanish Civil War and then just barrels straight ahead. It lassos echoes of the country's subsequent history into an overheated and baroque revenge tragedy, in which a pair of disfigured amoral circus clowns blaze away at each other with automatic weapons until narrative logic is a distant memory. None of which should be taken as a complaint.
Continue reading “Laugh, Clown, Laugh” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Divide (2011)
2011 SXSW Conferences & Festivals
"The Divide" plays to its strengths and doesn't chicken out of its logical conclusion; so as post-apocalyptic sci-fi downers go, it certainly has the courage of its throat-slitting, bone-snapping convictions. It also runs straight into the inherent nihilism problem. The idea that human beings are feral embittered creeps with morals and values that crumble under stress until "Lord of the Flies" looks like a nursery rhyme is cathartic, resonant and a path that has been worn smooth. It's a closed loop of narrative from which all surprise has drained.
Continue reading “Apocalypse Again” »
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'PAGE EIGHT'
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011
"Page Eight" feels like a throwback to an earlier, wordier kind of British spy drama, the kind in which M.I.5 bristles inwardly over not knowing all the facts and character actors from the Commonwealth arrive in shifts to deal with double agents over a double brandy. In short it feels like a slice of quality BBC television, and with good reason.
Marking David Hare's return to directing full-length feature films after many years, "Page Eight" has faith in the subtle powers of actors such as Bill Nighy, Judy Davis and Alice Krige to convey annoyance about a broken paper trail with a glance or anxiety over familial strife with a sigh. As long as your requirements of an espionage story don't insist on something blowing up, all this is very refreshing.
Continue reading “The Establishment Club” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Perfect Sense (2011)
2011 Sundance Film Festival
The sheer clarity of intent and scale of ambition in David Mackenzie's "Perfect Sense" is more than enough to obliterate the memory of his Hollywood misstep "Spread" as if it had never existed. Light years away from that film's glib delve into the lifestyles of adolescents whose world was too beautiful to care about, "Perfect Sense" is an icy fable about adults whose world has decided to shrug them off completely and start afresh.
Continue reading “Sense and Insensibility” »
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Since the Edinburgh International Film Festival's move from August to June, the films and guests available in the early summer slot have fallen nicely for the headline writers, culminating in last year's double whammy of "Antichrist" and "The Hurt Locker." This year fate was less kind, and the absence of true talking points only emphasized that most of the higher profile films were days away from wide release — though some ("Get Low," "Winter's Bone") were excellent. There was more action down in the festival's low-budget laboratories; but there, the trend to instantly dismiss exactly the kind of films that resist instant dismissal was in full effect. With odd vibes at the top and bottom, the result was a festival with a mild identity crisis.
Continue reading “Edinburgh International Film Festival ’10: Notes From the Underground” »