Still Life is a drab, muted movie, but that’s to be expected from a film about people dying alone and unloved. John May (Eddie Marsan) is employed by the council to track down the loved ones of the recently deceased. We open with a montage of John attending a series of funerals alone; the sole…
The word ‘necessary’ is perfect to describe Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, a film that is as difficult to watch as it is important. As explained by its opening title card, the film is constructed out of 1,001 images/videos taken from 1,001 Syrians – these videos, regularly drawn from crude cameraphones and interrupted by the trill…
Red Amnesia is a hard film to pin down. Xiaoshuai Wang’s film begins surveying a rundown old house and the brooding young man within, before leaping away to Shanghai to observe Deng (Lü Zhong), a recently widowed woman. She’s being hassled by mysterious phone calls with a sinister undertone, but the police aren’t interested in…
It’s hard to write about this Chinese-produced, Golden-Bear-winning film festival staple without talking about noir. The monochromatic English title hints at the film’s debt to the genre: a series of gruesome, unsolved murders; an alcoholic, disgraced detective; an enigmatic, beautiful femme fatale; an overarching sense of uncertainty. But the Chinese title – Bai Ri Yan…
The opening of Jalanan recalls The Act of Killing with titles displayed over Indonesian urban landscapes informing us that 7,000 of Jakarta’s 12 million inhabitants work as buskers. This documentary stoops under the poverty line to follow three such buskers over roughly a half-decade. Like The Act of Killing, it’s the work of a foreign…
Programming the opening night of a film festival must make for a tricky task. Whatever the remit of the festival proper, programmers tend to feel compelled to put a warm-hearted crowd-pleaser in front of the audience on the first night, which tends to attract a positive-but-underwhelmed critical reaction more often than not (with some exceptions:…
Hal uses intricate futurism to examine universal themes of bereavement and obligation. Running at a slim sixty minutes, it’s simplistic in its narrative and themes, but finds a gentle profundity and quiet beauty nonetheless. Ryôtarô Makihara’s anime feature begins with a robot idling in a peaceful stream; the tranquillity is shortly interrupted by the explosion…
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook remains one of the best – and scariest – horror movies of 2014, with only Oculus providing any real competition (for further details, check out my review from earlier the year!). Halloween heralded both its home entertainment release and its international cinematic release, where it’s raked in much more dosh than…
Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children has become the critical pariah of 2014, earning near-universal condemnation at its Toronto premiere and an abysmal 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. The main criticism is directed at its condescending, alarmist approach to social media, as though it might as well be titled Tumblr Madness. I’m not convinced that the…
Mockingjay – Part 1 is unsatisfactory not simply because it’s telling half a story, but because its ideas are given neither sufficient depth nor a sufficiently engaging narrative to wrap around them. Much like fellow threequel Matrix Revolutions, it trades the diverse visual palette of its predecessors for drab bunkers and ruins painted in endless…
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