irst Reformed, in upstate New York, is a tourist-trap church that no one actually attends. Once, long ago, this place served as a way-station on the underground railroad, providing shelter for runaway slaves en route to Canada. Now the church is preserved as a pretty antique, a clapboard white elephant propped up by a Christian conglomerate called Abundant Life and bankrolled by a billionaire industrialist who pollutes the environment. Its planned reconsecration is just a ghastly charade. Downsizing review – Matt Damon thinks small in Alexander Payne’s miniature masterpiece Damon stars as a man who shrinks down to the height…
Browsing: Film Reviews
A dying sheikh must be taken to the medieval Moroccan city of Sijilmasa, despite the decidedly rocky route. When the sheikh dies prematurely, rogues Ahmed (Ahmed Hammoud) and Said (Said Aagli) offer to transport the deceased for a fee – running into Shakib Ben Omar’s guardian angel along the way. Plot is not the takeaway https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=132&v=yn9eBMjjPcc from Mimosas, which reminded me of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, another slow-winding ramble through the mountains. The pleasure is in the crunchy, wind-bitten soundscapes and the texture of Oliver Laxe’s compositions; landscapes that encompass tiny figurines dwarfed by mountains. Source: The Guardian
From the comfort of your seat and cool air of the theater, camera and the story takes you deep into the society, not too far, just a subway ride away. Where you find a lot of similar stories. There is a small family, the father passes away, the mother (Sareh Bayat) has cancer and the younger son has no idea about what is going on. But this is his older brother played by Mehdi Ghorbani that with his magnificent performance takes your hearts with him where you feel his helplessness in finding cancer drugs for her mother, a mother with…
Set in a futuristic society, in a period close to ours, a devastating climate change has threatened to destroy all life on Earth and global corporations now rule the earth, controlling agricultural cultivation. The safe elite cities are protected from migrant invaders by magnetically shielded walls. For no apparent reason, a genetic crisis breaks out that hits all plantations. Professor of genetics, Erol Erin (Jean-Marc Barr), is set to investigate the reasons for the outbreak and aims to track down Cemil Akman (Ermin Bravo), another geneticist formerly employed by the same company, who wrote a theory on the Genetic Chaos…
Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante is one of the more uncompromising directors to have emerged in recent years. Favoring a form of brutal realism that’s found plenty of admirers on the festival circuit – particularly with the Cannes-winning Heli – he tends to focus on desperate characters whose marginal lives are marked by terrible violence, the latter often filmed in the unflinching, dispassionate style that’s become something of a default aesthetic thanks to Michael Haneke. With The Untamed, though, Escalante pushes the boundaries in a more intriguing way with a movie that could be pitched as a Mexican take on Under…
The latest in director Emmanuelle Bercot’s relentless crusade against social injustice, La Fille de Brest takes on the story of real-life whistleblower Dr Irène Frachon, who single-handedly fought a corrupt system to withdraw the harmful Mediator drug from the market. Mediator was originally marketed to overweight diabetics but often given to healthy women as diet pills. Between 1976 and November 2009, five million people were prescribed the medication, which claimed as many as 500 lives. The ensuing scandal grabbed headlines nationwide. In an effort to remain truthful to events, Bercot painstakingly recreates the bureaucratic clashes between Frachon (Sidse Babett Knudsen) – a lung specialist at Brest Hospital in Brittany who first alerted…
The reaction in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, started small. Group grieving turned to marches, which turned to demonstrations that eventually triggered a police riot. A trickle of looters hogged the national news spotlight, but that’s where Folayan and Davis step in. Images direct from the streets can record what news cameras never could: the fear, confusion and frustration of people who wake to discover an international news story happening on their front lawn. The exterior scenes are shot with little commentary, casting a spotlight on those rarely given a platform. Naturally, some are more eloquent than others.…
Irffan Khan worked with Anup Singh in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost. Anup Singh is back with yet another cinematic folk tale — The Song of Scorpions — which had its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival on August 9. With two features to his credit, Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of a River) and Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost, Singh is an extraordinarily perceptive auteur. And he has always had exceptional actors to bring his dreamy stories to life. Irffan Khan, for instance, could not have been a more ideal protagonist for Qissa.…
The silences are what you dread in Annabelle: Creation. Whenever there is a lull in the storytelling, you always know that the next jolt is about to be felt. The film is very effective in giving its audience the collywobbles, which is precisely what they want from a story like this. They know that they’re being strung along and grossly manipulated but that is part of the pleasure. This is the prequel to 2014’s Annabelle. It deliberately takes its time in cranking up. The early scenes portray a family living an idyllic life in dusty, Midwestern 1940s America. Doll maker Samuel Mullins…
If there is one movie we all looked forward watching, it was The Wedding Party. If our anxiety was at 70 Kemi’s own was certainly at 150…I say so because even though the movie had premiered outside Nigeria, Kemi knew that it was the reception her movie received at home in Nigeria that truly mattered to her. How do I know this? She expressed herself at the premier of the movie at Eko Hotels in 2016 and everyone was in awe of her mastery. The Wedding party follows the shenanigans that go on during the planning of a wedding in…