The Italian writer-director Saverio Constanzo has offered the Venice film festival some unpretentious calorific fun with this enjoyable film: a tasty, showbizzy crowd-pleaser and romantic melodrama with a vivid streak of surreal absurdity in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is the tale of an unconventionally beautiful duckling who becomes more of a swan than the glamorous people she idolises; her dreams come true – or sort of true – in 1950s Rome in the heyday of the giant Cinecittà film studio. There are seductive performances from Lily James as the…
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Based on French journalist Florence Aubenas’s bestselling non-fiction book, The Night Cleaner, in which she investigated the rising disparity and disconnect within French society through her experiences in the port city of Caen, Between Two Worlds casts Juliette Binoche in the role of a famed author named Marianne, who goes undercover as a professional cleaner to explore the exploitation of the working class in Northern France. She starts out cleaning homes and offices while making friends with other cleaners, most especially Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), a single mother who opens up her life to Marianne and gives her real insight into the role that…
With his fourth feature directing, mop-haired actor-director Louis Garrel puts a French stamp on the Hollywood heist movie. The Innocent is a screwball romcom-caper starring Garrel himself as a guy who gets caught up in a plot to pilfer a job lot of caviar (you don’t get more Gallic than that). It’s a broad, enjoyable, lighthearted movie with a fair few not-insignificant plot holes, but a genuinely surprising storyline that keeps you guessing to the end. https://youtu.be/P5gQ7pp_kdc?si=ySTMZ50_FuPehzNf Garrel plays Abel, a young widower, just 32, who’s been emotionally dormant since his wife died. Though he is is close to his…
The feature debut by Johnny Barrington – who came to prominence in 2012 with the darkly surreal and funny, BAFTA-nominated short Tumult – is a strong and confident bow from a director who consistently undercuts the tenets of social realism with hints of the magical and the dreamlike. With its Scottish locale (specifically, the Isle of Lewis) and gentle genre breaking, comparisons to filmmaker Bill Forsyth are probably unavoidable. But, in the case of Silent Roar – which opened this year’s “special edition” of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (see the news) – they are probably appropriate. Dondo (Louis McCartney)…
On first glance Empty Nets may sound like a typical old-fashioned Iranian film with the oft-used tale of a poor boy in love with a rich girl. However writer-director Behrooz Karamizadeh distinguishes his film from a flurry of other socially conscious love stories by instilling political overtones and adding a visual panache. Amir (newcomer Hamid Reza Abbasi) is working as a delivery boy for a catering company in a seaside town in northern Iran. His meagre pay just about supports himself while his mother, with whom he lives, earns a little bit by making and selling homemade pickles. Amir is in love…
Is your comfort zone really still yours when you choose to share it with someone else? Does comfort equal happiness and is the present dependent on the past? These are some of the important questions raised by Filip Diviak’s 8-minute movie My Name is Edgar and I Have a Cow. With its boldly expressive style and rough hand-drawn strokes which bring sharpness to otherwise delicate watercolor textures, the Czech-Slovak co-production shines with its heartfelt humor and attention to detail. We see the world through the eyes of Edgar, a simple man living a simple life, surrounded by his favorite possessions.…
But in other ways it is, of course, completely different from that, or any other conventionally fictionalised and scripted drama. Reality’s cool, unemphasised and unsignposted dialogue goes completely against what we expect from a movie’s usual direction and editing: hitting significant dramatic beats, making important things obvious and (to quote the remark sometimes attributed to Billy Wilder) making the subtleties obvious as well. This, by contrast, is the live feed from reality, what the raw and untreated dialogue we speak sounds like when all laid out. When Winner voices concerns about her cat and dog, that might, in a conventional…
This film from British Iranian director Hassan Nazer was the British entry in the international feature section at this year’s Academy Awards; sadly it was not nominated. It is a likable, gentle comedy about two children in which an Oscar statuette plays a part: the ultimate MacGuffin, perhaps. It’s also a rather cinephile film which ponders the enormous prestige of Iranian cinema abroad. The premise is that the great Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, having boycotted the 2017 Oscars in protest at Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, cannot be there in person to pick up his Oscar for The Salesman. But…
It is the season for great scares with tons of movies for those into the horror genre. A unique film in this genre with a psychological terror spin, will be premiering October 28th, 2022 in limited theatrical release domestically and digitally on Apple iTunes. What makes this story disturbing is it based on true events in the home of the Producer, Director, and Writer William Mark McCullough. The McCullough family experienced terrifying moments that would make you ask questions about what is living inside the walls of this house. “A Savannah Haunting” is produced by innovative Emmy Award Nominee Alexis…
With the urgency of a good thriller and the clarity of a fable, World War III is the grueling but compelling tale of how one of life’s victims learns to imitate his oppressors. Largely unspooling on the set of a bad film being made about the Holocaust, Iranian Houman Seyedi’s sixth feature starts out as jet-black comedy before darkening still further into tragedy, a journey embodied in an absorbing and extraordinary central performance by Mohsen Tanabandeh as the film’s downtrodden hero. https://youtu.be/4BnUJCousqY Seyedi’s work has regularly won acclaim at home, and the premiere of World War III in Venice’s Orizzonti…