The filmmaking duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have gone about in some kind of relative obscurity since their first feature Amer in 2009. While that striking debut perhaps should’ve garnered them more attention, as well as the subsequent The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, it feels safe to say they’re not out to get that crossover hit. If anything, they seem content kind of just doing the same thing over and over again. To those not in the know, their whole deal is doing riffs on genre that cut out virtually all the connective tissue, leaving simply a…
Browsing: Film Reviews
Blending elements of magical realism, political strife and Kafkaesque ennui to partially satisfying effect, Oblivion Verses (Los Versos del Olvido) marks an intriguing if rather elusive feature debut for Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami. Set in an unknown Latin American state (the film was presumably shot in Chile), there are moments that recall Pablo Lorrain’s second feature, Post Mortem, which also dealt with morgues, death squads and the trauma of unclaimed corpses in a corrupted land. But here, the narrative is much more opaque, pushing viewers to clutch at straws in order to follow Khatami’s different plot strands, which shuttle between reality and fantasy…
After the 2010 triumph of Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky is back in Venice with another dark picture. Mother! could be summed up as “Jennifer Lawrence walks around a house while really crazy s**t happens”, but of course there’s so much more than that. A couple (the names are never told) lives in a countryside house so that he – a poet (Javier Bardem) – can find inspiration again. One day a stranger knocks at the door (Ed Harris), and soon his wife too (a marvellous Michelle Pfeiffer); from that moment on, a series of increasingly disturbing events take place. It’s a slow descent…
I don’t know why I was avoiding watching “Sara & Ayda”, may be the title wasn’t attractive enough for me…but at last I convinced myself to see it as I thought a film by Maziar Miri, can’t turn up to be a lousy one. But unfortunately the day that I picked to see the film was a Tuesday, a day that in Tehran movie passes are half priced. We ended up to see the film in late show at Farhang movie theater, but now I wish we had picked another night of the week, because the sound effect of everyone…
Iranian cinema continues to draw large audiences at festivals, and Vahid Jalilvand’s second feature ‘No Date, No Signature’ (‘Bedoune Tarikh, Bedoune Emza’) was much applauded at its Venice Horizons bow. In the tradition of Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Separation,’ its story zeroes in on the class conflict between the rich and the poor and plays, less than convincingly, on the guilt feelings of a powerful forensic pathologist who is involved in an accident that may or may not have caused a child’s death. Lensed with great sensitivity and style and superbly acted, it has one drawback for Western audiences in its…
It has some promising moments, but there is something forced, contrived and a bit cliched about this fey British indie in the road-movie style. Two teenage stepbrothers, Michael (Jack Parry-Jones) and Thor (Christy O’Donnell), set out from Shetland to Glasgow on a dual mission: Michael to confront his girlfriend, who is at uni and who he suspects is cheating on him, and Thor to find his estranged and remarried mum. On the way, they meet up with singer Caitlin. In this role, Tara Lee is landed with a frankly unconvincing manic-pixie-rock-chick role – a tough, street-smart character who is there…
The holiday season is right around the corner, which means now is a perfect time to snuggle up indoors and watch a few movies. And the Trump era also happens to be right around the corner, which makes now an excellent time to prepare oneself for what’s coming. Luckily, you can do both simultaneously. While President-elect Donald Trump is something new in American politics, his rise to power does have international precedents. Other countries have seen this movie before. And over the past few decades, brilliant filmmakers from around the world have produced films that reflect their own national brushes…
Many Czechs head to cinema to see the long-awaited new motion picture by popular and critically acclaimed father & son duo Zdeněk (*1936) and Jan Svěrák (*1965). However the responses are very differents. Director Jan Svěrák studied documentary at the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). He even got the Student Academy Award for his 20 minutes long mockumentary Oil Gobblers in 1988. Nevertheless, he is better known for successful collaboration with his father screenwriter Zdeněk Svěrák which led in 1997 to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for their Kolya. The…
Alexander Payne has been making movies about middle-aged, average American men who feel small for most of his career (from Election through Nebraska). When he’s stepping out of his comfort zone for futuristic whimsy in Downsizing he’s still making a movie about a middle-aged, average American man who feels small—and indeed gets even smaller—but the scope of the project reveals a sweeter side of Payne. Before the premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival (starting today) Payne has described the project as similar to Black Mirror, and though there are some situations that mirror those bleak technology fables, Downsizing is definitely a throwback to the style of 40s Hollywood…
Iranian artist and director Shirin Neshat’s new film “Looking for Oum Kulthum” will have its world premiere at Giornate degli Autori – Venice Days on the fringes of the 74th Venice International Film Festival organized by La Biennale di Venezia (August 30 to September 9). The film is one of 12 selected from all over the world, in competition for the Official Awards. Neshat’s “film within a film” tells the story of an Iranian director by the name of Mitra who embarks on her dream project of making a film about the legendary Egyptian singer and diva Oum Kulthum. But as she explores…