Film
fisun.guner
With only a modest, handheld camera and an iPhone at his disposal, the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi shot this film in secret whilst under house arrest. His close friend, and co-director of this film, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, then smuggled it into France hidden in a cake as a last-minute submission to Cannes last year. Made whilst awaiting his appeal for a six-year prison sentence and a film-making ban of 20 years for publicly supporting the opposition party in Iran’s 2009 election, the film bravely and eloquently attempts to circumvent these restrictions: he is not " Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the most refreshing aspects of current Latin American cinema, most evident in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, is a particular brand of off-beat romantic comedy – one with echoes of the literate and quirky US independents of the Eighties and Nineties, of Hartley, Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, but laced with melancholy and shards of realism that are specifically Latin.Bonsai, from Chile, is a delightful example of this. Adapted from Alejandro Zambra’s novella by writer/director Cristián Jiménez, it is an individual and wonderfully playful film, teasing us with intimations of rom-com, before Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Theo Angelopoulos (pictured below) was hit and killed by a motorcyclist on 24 January, as this now final collection of his work was readied. The films of this 76-year-old Palme d’Or-winner (for 1998’s Eternity and a Day, included) wrestled with the tragic recent history of his native Greece and Balkans at sometimes notorious, slowly unfolding length. An old-time maestro aspiring to novelistic depth, he lured Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irene Jacob to his unintended swansong, 2008’s The Dust of Time (unreleased in the UK in any form till now). These DVDs are an elegy to the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Into the Abyss sees celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog take a sharp turn away from those marvels of early man he so magnificently captured in the stereoscopic Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the shocking violence of which humanity is also capable, here both greed-fuelled and state-sanctioned. It’s a documentary which takes as its focus a multiple homicide and is both an anatomy of a (triple) murder and a passionate, if frequently askew, petition against the death penalty.Wearing his anti-capital punishment stance proudly from the outset, Herzog delves into the 2001 murder of Sandra Stotler Read more ...
ash.smyth
A couple of nights ago I went to a book launch at Waterstone’s, Notting Hill, for a collection of un-illustrated short stories (Household Worms) by a visual artist (Stanley Donwood) perhaps best known for his work in the music industry (producing iconic record covers for Radiohead).This invitation-only party was a circus of extroverted introverts: women in bow ties, men sporting double-breasted Van Gogh jackets, and almost everyone with “interesting” hair. Think the geekier end of the Radiohead fanbase crossed with, well, the west-London literary scene. Eyes closed, though, it was pretty good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Bunting is currently serving 11 life sentences. He was Australia’s serial killer. A murderous manipulator masquerading as a vigilante, he brought young people, their family members and a disenfranchised suburban community into his madness. Snowtown dramatises these deeply distressing events.Produced by Warp Films - also behind the challenging Tyrannosaur - Snowtown slots into a lineage with the fictive Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the fact-based Bundy. Like Ted Bundy, Bunting was a charmer. He wheedled his way into a fractured household on the edges of Adelaide Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Olympics will be upon us all any minute now, but for the residents of East London they have been physically sprouting at the end of the road in the shape of a futuristic stadium for years. It takes the role of a shy walk-on in Wild Bill, a looming symbol of a local regeneration which was touted as integral to the hosting bid. It’s safe to say that the London seen here will not earn the grateful rubberstamp of the Cultural Olympiad. If you could get onto a podium for knifing, gashing, stabbing, thumping and thrashing, the characters we meet here could have been contenders. They’d probably Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There are many directors who profess (or have claimed for them) one sort of naturalistic cinema or another, from Ken Loach in the UK, to Bruno Dumont in France and Lisandro Alonso in Argentina. It’s an odd characteristic of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, that one feels almost discourteous to give them any such label. To do so would suggest at least some degree of artificiality, of self-conscious and discernible design; but when you watch a Dardenne film, there isn’t a single moment that doesn’t ring true.The Kid With a Bike is no exception. As with The Promise, Rosetta, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.The Hunger Games’ fiercely self-reliant Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old with the weight of a broken world on her stoical shoulders, fighting tooth and nail to protect her family from starvation and violent oppression. Twilight’s meek, passively dependent Bella Swan Read more ...