film directors
1945 review - Hungarian holocaust dramaFriday, 12 October 2018
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the... Read more... |
LFF 2018: Colette review - zinging with zeitgeisty relevanceFriday, 12 October 2018
The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but... Read more... |
First Man - Neil Armstrong's giant leapThursday, 11 October 2018
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Kubrick's MusicSunday, 07 October 2018
Stanley Kubrick’s use of music in his films has been inspirational. In 1999, The Caretaker – a nom-de-musique of Jim Kirby – issued Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom. While his alter-ego openly acknowledged the director’s film The Shining... Read more... |
Tehran Taboo review - transgressive animationSaturday, 06 October 2018
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: ZamaSaturday, 29 September 2018
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early... Read more... |
Black 47 review - a gripping and unusual dramaThursday, 27 September 2018
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a... Read more... |
Skate Kitchen review - sisterhood in the skate parkThursday, 27 September 2018
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young... Read more... |
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. review - not your average popstarSaturday, 22 September 2018
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers... Read more... |
DVD: MarioTuesday, 18 September 2018
Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star... Read more... |
'I saw that death is beautiful, unspeakable and strange': on filming 'Island'Monday, 10 September 2018
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: RedoubtableSunday, 09 September 2018
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting... Read more... |
