BIFF: Hotel by the River (2018)
Hotel by the River is a slight, but interesting experiment for Hong Sang-soo aficionados.
The World of Us: Intimacy and Betrayal in Prepubescent Friendship
The World of Us is a film of childhood friendship, and therefore it’s a film about rituals of social exclusion.
Home is Where the Truth Is: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm
A gentle, thoughtful reflection on how family punctures our most elaborately-conceived fictions.
Behemoth (2015)
Behemoth’s immensity gives way to wounded specificity, in an elegy aching with pain.
Queen of Katwe (2016)
Disney’s underdog Ugandan chess story digs a little deeper into the difficulties of overcoming disadvantage.
The Alluring Ambiguity of Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper offers a challenging reflection upon identity and spirituality, enriched by Kristen Stewart’s extratextual resonance with its themes. Also, there are ghosts.
The Dark Wind (2016)
The Dark Wind tells the story of the Islamic State’s impact on the Yazidi community, a Kurdish group targeted for genocide in 2014.
The Bacchus Lady (2016)
Trust South Korea to turn a film about elderly sex workers into a black comedy.
Top 10 picks of 2016 Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival
For SBS Movies, I run down the top ten films to see at the 2016 Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival.
BAPFF: Atomic Heart (2015)
If Iranian cinema has a home, it’s the automobile. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Ten, Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Ali Ahmadzade’s Atomic Heart is a road movie without any particular destination in mind, drifting idly through Tehran’s twilight streets, through conversations about atomic mothers and dormant dictators. But where those…
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