film festivals
Blu-ray: Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta)Wednesday, 10 July 2024There’s a lot to unpick in Zoltán Fabri’s 1956 film Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta). Take leading man Imre Soós’s disarming resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, and a central love story which plays out like a Hungarian take on Romeo and Juliet with some... Read more... |
Green Border review - Europe's baleful boundaryFriday, 21 June 2024We’re used to dabs of colour splashing briefly across black-and-white movies – Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Coppola’s Rumble Fish spring to mind – but director Agnieszka Holland has a new and uncompromising variant on the ruse.The colour opening... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
Michael Powell interview - 'I had no idea that critics were so innocent'Tuesday, 24 October 2023Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2023 - provocation, celebration and film-buzzing communitySaturday, 07 October 2023When Kristy Matheson won the job of BFI London Film Festival director, she spoke of the chance afforded by festivals for filmmakers, artists and audiences “to commune on a grand scale – to experience ideas, ask big questions and celebrate together.”... Read more... |
Strange Way of Life review - Pedro Almodóvar's queer WesternTuesday, 26 September 2023Less is more, except when it isn’t. Among the latest batch of overlong Oscar-tipped movies by celebrated auteurs such as Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer with a running time of 181 minutes) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon, 207 mins),... Read more... |
Baato review - Nepalese mountain folk await big changes with excitement and anxietySunday, 30 July 2023It doesn’t do to be in a hurry in Nepal. In Baato, directors Kate Stryker and Lucas Millard follow Mikma and her family as they travel 300 kilometres from their mountain village in Eastern Nepal to the town of Terai. It takes the best part of a week... Read more... |
Blu-ray: EOTuesday, 25 April 2023The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a... Read more... |
Pacifiction review - portending hell in paradiseMonday, 24 April 2023Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his... Read more... |
Markie Robson-Scott's Top 10 Films of 2022Tuesday, 20 December 2022Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin... Read more... |
Nick Hasted's Top 10 Films of 2022Saturday, 17 December 2022Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody... Read more... |
Directors the Dardenne brothers: 'To be living means to be fragile'Saturday, 03 December 2022Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made their home region of Liège the site of excruciating moral crises and crushing injustice. Their 12 masterful, double Palme d'Or-winning films act as parables for the embattled human soul.The... Read more... |
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