Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2016 i Little White Lies

Since the turn of the new millennium, the documentary has made a spectacular rise as an entertainment medium. As such, the very concept of what a documentary is, what it means, what it promises to a viewer, remains in constant flux. Even though it contains moments of overt fiction, some critics have described Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights as being a documentary – in that it embodies a number of key characteristics of the form. We put the question out there to a host of filmmakers, programmers and producers to find out… what actually is docuementary in 2016? MARC ISAACS Director – All White In Barking Documentary is a word that means less and less to me. It assumes some sort of privileged relationship with the real, as though a documentary…

Directed by LÁSZLÓ NEMES, Starring GÉZA RÖHRIG LEVENTE MOLNÁR URS RECHN Released 29 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. The Palme d’Or winner that should have been. 4 ENJOYMENT. It’s calculated to stun and, on those terms, it’s ruthlessly effective. 4 IN RETROSPECT. The brute force is punishing, but there’s real moral and intellectual rigour behind it. With his powerful debut feature, Hungarian director László Nemes uses a single blank face to convey the unspeakable. His protagonist – the titular Saul (Géza Röhrig) – is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners who empy the gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in exchange for paltry privileges during World War II. Through long takes and shallow focus, the camera is permanently trained on Röhrig’s face and, as the encircling horrors close in on…

Directed by PATRICIO GUZMÁN, Starring PATRICIO GUZMÁN CLAUDIO MERCADO EMMA MALIG Released 18 MARCH 5 ANTICIPATION. How does one follow up the masterful Nostalgia For the Light? ENJOYMENT. 4 A sobering, lyrical essay film on Chile’s various physical and emotional surface areas. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Grows in magnitude and importance with each passing day. Patricio Guzmán’s cinema travels through time and space with the seamless ease of a whisper. Humanist and historical, intergalactic and elemental, his films are deceptively dense. One moment could be mired in the trauma of Chile’s dictatorial Pinochet era, and the next ascending to the heavens or dipping underneath the water’s surface. Malleability remains a crucial component for a filmmaker working so thoroughly in the cross section between national history and personal memory. After spending Nostalgia For the Light…

Directed by HIROKAZU KOREEDA, Starring SUZU HIROSE MASAMI NAGASAWA KAHO Released 15 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. One of Japan’s finest filmmakers returns. 4 ENJOYMENT. So delicate it sometimes threatens to evaporate in front of your eyes. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A film that whispers its message, which is nice sometimes. Perhaps it’s just fortuitous timing, but this latest film by Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda could be read as a call for empathy as Europe questions itself over what tabloid newspapers are so bullishly terming the “migrant crisis”. The story told in Our Little Sister has no literal connection to this real geopolitical event, nor does it contain any direct commentary on it. Yet, in whisking up a subtle drama about the surprise and enrichment that can come from accepting an outsider into a closed family, it…

Directed by JEAN-MARC VALLÉE, Starring JAKE GYLLENHAAL NAOMI WATTS CHRIS COOPER Released 29 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Vallée is an underrated director of alternative crowdpleasers. 4 ENJOYMENT. A moving account of how the process of grief can take on strage forms. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Helped no end by a charming, laid-back central performance from Gyllenhaal. Investment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is driving along with his wife, Julia (Heather Lind). They’re in the midst a mundane conversation about home appliances. All of a sudden a car crashes into them, killing Julia. The credits follow, and the word ‘Demolition’ appears on screen. It’s a shocking gesture: we’re introduced to a character, then they’re instantly killed. The scene finds its precedent in some of the director Jean-Marc Vallée’s other openings: a dropped child in 2005’s C.R.A.Z.Y.;…

Directed by JACO VAN DORMAEL, Starring PILI GROYNE BENOÎT POELVOORDE CATHERINE DENEUVE Released 25 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. Belgian comedy is often hit-ormiss, sometimes worth to risk two hours of your time. 2 ENJOYMENT. Time passes slowly and fades away and ‘love’ definitely isn’t ‘loving’. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Do not waste the unknown number of hours of life you have left on incoherent schmaltz. The various depressing global events which coloured the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, added to the the unusual frequency with which beloved celebrities have been dying, could truly make anyone take the premise of The Brand New Testament very seriously indeed. Maybe the reason why this world often seems cruel is that God himself – supposing he exists – is a bitter and selfish man. In Jaco…

Directed by JOACHIM TRIER, Starring JESSE EISENBERG ISABELLE HUPPERT GABRIEL BYRNE Released 22 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. Very high hopes resting on this one. 4 ENJOYMENT. Tells a familiar story in a new and vital way. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Like all good films, this one is built for repeat viewings. The leap in quality between Joachim Trier’s stellar directorial debut Reprise and its even-more-stellar follow-up Oslo, 31 August was, in a word, giant. Where we are with his latest film (and first in the English language) is a big step to the side, and a small shuffle backwards. But where those first two films landed swift and hard punches to the gut, Louder Than Bombs opts for death by a thousand small, incisive cuts. Casting chronological story-telling aside, the film depicts a middle class…

Directed by JACQUES AUDIARD, Starring JESUTHASAN ANTONYTHASAN KALIEASWARI SRINIVASAN CLAUDINE VINASITHAMBY Released 8 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Jacques Audiard follows up Rust & Bone with something a little different. 3 ENJOYMENT. And it’s great, until it’s not great. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Reasons to believe his next one could be great. There’s an amazing trick shot early on in Jacques Audiard’s surprise Palme d’Or winner Dheepan where our eponymous hero (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), having managed to flee from Sri Lanka (where he was engaged as a foot soldier in the Tamil Tigers) to France, begins a new life selling novelty trinkets from a suitcase. All we see is flashing blue and red lights on a blanket of deep black, and it looks for a moment as if an aeroplane is landing at night. In terms of…

Directed by STÉPHANE BRIZÉ, Starring VINCENT LINDON KARINE DE MIRBECK MATTHIEU SCHALLER Released 8 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. This is the film that won the perennially undervalued Lindon the Best Actor award at Cannes. 4 ENJOYMENT. An absorbing and enraging look at a broken system. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Brizé and Lindon measure up. If the art of listening is the key to good acting, then Vincent Lindon’s performance in The Measure of a Man is a masterclass. He plays Thierry Taugourdeau, a longtime factory worker now seeking employment having been laid off in a round of redundancies some 20 months prior. For much of Stéphane Brizé’s quietly engrossing character study, all he can do is sit and listen as a variety of people explain why his chances of finding a job are so limited.…

Directed by XAVIER GIANNOLI, Starring CATHERINE FROT, ANDRÉ MARCON, MICHEL FAU Released 18 MARCH Marguerite is poignant to anyone interested in the painful gulf that can exist between an individual’s creative ambition and their talent. Xavier Giannoli gives a ’20s Parisian spin to the case of wealthy American society singer, Florence Foster Jenkins – who is receiving her own biopic starring Meryl Streep. Given the extreme empathy that Giannoli shows for his laughing-stock leading lady, it feels cruel to report that his life, while not fully imitating his art, possesses a shadow of a parallel. Marguerite suffers from a storytelling tameness that erodes the power of its subject. At the centre of the film is a hugely sympathetic performance by Catherine Frot. Marguerite’s delusions about the quality of her singing continue because of…

Directed by ROMAN POLANSKI, Starring JON FINCH FRANCESCA ANNIS MARTIN SHAW 1971 Released 15 MARCH Blu-ray That sound you can hear in the distance is the party poppers being pulled by a thousand UK cinephiles, elated at the news that one of the US’s most cherished home entertainment labels, Criterion, are opening for business on home turf. No more ridiculous import fees or searching for modified players that can handle Blu-rays with out-of-town region coding. We finally get a seat at this most vaunted of buffets. One of their first releases in the UK is Roman Polanski’s 1971 version of Macbeth, starring a never-better Jon Finch as the mad eyed usurper of the Scottish crown. With films like Knife in the Water and Repulsion, Polanski set out his stall as a master of…

Directed by RICHARD FLEISCHER, Starring KIRK DOUGLAS TONY CURTIS ERNEST BORGNINE 1958 Released 7 MARCH Blu-ray The competition isn’t particularly strong, but we can say with a degree of certainty that Richard Fleischer’s salty 1958 historical adventure film, The Vikings, is the greatest ever film made about Vikings. A toothsome Kirk Douglas excels as ass-grabbing, axe-throwing, meatchomping Viking prince Einar, who lives to serve the will of his assgrabbing, axe-throwing, meat-chomping father, Ragnar, played by Ernest Borgnine. English moustache-twirlers take their eye off the ball and so their princess is kidnapped and spirited away to the Norwegian countryside to become a beautiful bargaining chip. Also in the mix is Tony Curtis’ embittered slave Eric, wearing leather hot paints so scandalously short that it’s hard to know where to look when he’s on screen.…

Directed by NORMAN FOSTER, Starring ANN SHERIDAN DENNIS O'KEEFE ROSS ELLIOTT 1950 Released 19 APRIL Blu-ray One of those lost golden nuggets that has managed to shimmy its way to the surface of modern film culture, Norman Foster’s (no relation) superb San Francisco-set noir thriller packs insane amounts of action and energy into its 79 minute runtime. It’s rediscoveries like this that make you thankful for the work of festivals, programmers and researchers who make it their professional duty to make sure great cinema like this isn’t lost to the sands of time. Paramount among its countless pleasures is actor Ann Sheridan who aces every line she delivers and every expression she flashes towards the lens. She plays Eleanor Johnson, the fatigued wife of aspiring painter Frank (Ross Elliott). One night when Frank…

LISBON GOMES, You don’t know me, but I do know you. I’ve already been what you are, and am sending you this letter from your future. To be clear: I’m writing to myself twelve years ago. In my defence, this absurd idea is not my own, but comes from the magazine where this letter is being published. Please forgive my having had the nerve to go ahead with the challenge on behalf of us both. But please do not be upset about it. From my vantage point, you’re actually dead (in the Proustian sense, I believe you have read him), and I am not yet alive in your time. In reality, you’ll never be able to read these lines. You’re the prisoner of days long gone. You’re also the prisoner…

Directed by JEFF NICHOLS, Starring MICHAEL SHANNON JOEL EDGERTON KIRSTEN DUNST Released 15 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. After Take Shelter and Mud, there’s no doubting that Jeff Nichols is the real deal. 4 ENJOYMENT. A bold and extremely ballsy film that balances gentle moments with bursts of jaw-dropping spectacle. 5 IN RETROSPECT. Just go and see it, okay? There comes a point in any successful filmmaker’s career when they stop being referred to as ‘the next big thing’ or ‘one to watch’ and start becoming known simply by name – their reputation and irrefutable talent rendering such labels obsolete. For Jeff Nichols, that time is surely now. Since announcing himself back in 2007 with Shotgun Stories, the Arkansas-born writer/director has quietly established himself as a superlative spinner of dark, deceptively simple yarns that always…

Directed by TOM GEENS, Starring PAUL HIGGINS KATE DICKIE JÉRÔME KIRCHER Released 8 APRIL 2 ANTICIPATION. Hole no! 3 ENJOYMENT. Hole on… 3 IN RETROSPECT. A hole lot more interesting than it should be. Belgian filmmaker Tom Geens’ second feature does what it says on the tin; its central characters, John (Paul Higgins) and Karen (Kate Dickie) are a middle-class couple who live – quite literally – in a hole. Somewhere in the Pyrenees, the pair have settled into a comfortable routine; John hunting and foraging, skinning and roasting, while Karen stitches, sews and sleeps. In fact, their peaceful woodland life seems to be going smoothly, except for the fact that Karen can’t bring herself to leave the hole. John is patient, massaging his stubborn, fearful wife’s out-of-practice joints with attentive tenderness, but…

Directed by PABLO LARRAIN, Starring ALFREDO CASTRO ANTONIA ZEGERS MARCELO ALONSO Released 25 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Pablo Larrain can lead us anywhere. 4 ENJOYMENT. Horrible, but compellingly so: 4 IN RETROSPECT. A perfect example of cinema’s capacity to confront evil. Chilean director Pablo Larrain led us so deeply into darkness with the blackly comic one-two punch of Tony Manero and Post Mortem, that his previous feature, No, the story of the advertising campaign to oust Pinochet, almost felt like light relief. With his new film, The Club, he returns to the embrace the gloom once more, with a film that makes for a fascinating and contrasting companion piece to the recent Spotlight as it illuminates sexual abuses and corruption within the Catholic church in scathing satirical style. Located in grim Chilean fishing town…

Directed by MAGNUS VON HORN, Starring ULRIK MUNTHER MATS BLOMGREN LOA EK Released 11 MARCH 3 ANTICIPATION. This low-key Swedish drama picked up plenty of plaudits on the European festival circuit. 4 ENJOYMENT. An accomplished, atmospheric debut feature. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Excited to see what both director and star do next. At a time when compelling true-crime dramas like Spotlight, TV’s Making a Murderer and NPR’s Serial podcast are keeping water coolers everywhere well-stocked, it feels odd to suddenly put yourself in the shoes of someone who is unequivocally guilty of committing a terrible act. That’s the set-up for Swedish writer/director Magnus von Horn’s impressive debut feature, The Here After, which centres around a young offender’s reintegration into a close-knit rural community that’s not yet ready to forgive and forget. Which is understandable,…

Directed by ALICE WINOCOUR, Starring MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS DIANE KRUGER ZAÏD ERROUGUIDEMONSANT Released 25 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Matthias Schoenaerts has lately been in a string of duds. 3 ENJOYMENT. But now he’s back and reminding us why we fell in love with him in the first place. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Lots of good stuff here. Winocour will go on to make even stronger films. You sense that there’s a secret cadre of cloven-hoofed agents working out of Hollywood, California whose task it is to wheedle out untested mavericks who might just be able to make a go of it in the factory of dreams. Possessing the aptitude to able to make profound statements about life and humanity through gesture or nuance – that sublime melding of sound and image! – may not be so…

Directed by BEN WHEATLEY, Starring TOM HIDDLESTON JEREMY IRONS SIENNA MILLER Released 18 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Love Wheatley's Down Terrace and Kill List, and like his Sightseers and A Field of England. 4 ENJOYMENT. Through the broad belly laughs it reaches dizzying, despairing heights. 5 IN RETROSPECT. A multi-level blueprint of the UK's class politics, exposing the delirious ruins of Thatcher's utopian enterprise. “Sometimes he found it difficult to believe in a future that had not already taken place.” In Ben Wheatley's High-Rise, this line appears as an introductory voice-over from protagonist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), who, three months after he has moved into the titular tower block, is taking stock and scribbling down his recent experiences. One sure sign of the self-alienating transformation that Laing has undergone since his arrival is the…

Directed by CHAITANYA TAMHANE, Starring VIRA SATHIDAR, VIVEK GOMBER, GEETANJALI KULKARNI Released 25 MARCH Chaitanya Tamhane’s camera watches from a distance. His static wide shots capture the dramas of intersecting lives in Mumbai, letting meaning gradually reveal itself. Evidence accumulates until there is a vivid picture. The trial of a provocative singer named Narayan (Vira Sathidar) provides the story arc, but this is not a generic legal procedural. Tamhane plots his scenes to play out at a naturalistic pace, camouflaging social details within banal situations in the vein of the late, great Chantal Akerman. His depiction of the Indian judicial system is coruscating, but this is not immediately clear from the film’s gentle tone. Before Narayan is arrested he is shown teaching a group of small children. He chants three sets of questions…

Directed by AMBER FARES Released 25 MARCH There’s something hearteningly ramshackle about Amber Fares’ flyon-the-dashboard documentary which glances into the lives of a Palestinian, all-female motorsport team. It certainly puts paid to F1 chief Bernie Eccleston’s recent remarks that women driving cars just look “silly”. There are rivalries and tantrums, heroes and villains, but the material remains loosely episodic, never forcibly cobbled into a standardised sports movie arc. So where the structure of a multi-race championship gives the film its basic momentum, Fares is just as interested in looking into her characters’ equally-eventful personal lives. Marah, Mona, Betty and Noor are the chosen protagonists, front and centre being the antagonism between glamorous media darling Betty, and homely, modest Marah. It soon becomes obvious that Speed Sisters can’t offer a conventional sports movie…

Directed by TOM DESIMONE, Starring LINDA CAROL WENDY O WILLIAMS PAT AST 1986 Released NOW Blu-ray If Hollywood has told us anything, it’s that going to prison in the 1980s was absolutely brilliant. The company’s cool, the rules are lax, and the sexual liaisons are erotic rather than enforced. Caught for driving the escape vehicle for her jagoff boyfriend after a bungled heist, Jenny (Linda Carol) is sent down for hard time in an all-girls reform school that’s styled a little like an MTV prisoner of war camp. Her twin nemeses take the form of Amazonian fetish-wear hellion, Charlie Chambliss (Wendy O Williams, one-time lead singer of punk-metal exhibitionists, The Plasmatics), and kitten-stomping wench, Edna (Pat Ast), the brutal warden. Becoming wise to the tribal ways of prison life, Jenny eventually settles into…

Directed by EDWARD YANG, Starring CHANG CHEN LISA YANG CHANG KUO-CHU 1991 Released 21 MARCH Blu-ray “I was bored from hiding out so I’d read ten swordsman novels a day. I told them to rent me the thickest book they could find. I found that people in the past were just like us street gangs. There was this one dude... everyone thought he went cuckoo... I remember that everyone had run away and the city was ablaze... He alone stayed to assassinate Napoleon... In the end he failed and was caught... ‘War and Peace’… I forgot the titles of all the swordsman novels. This is the only one I remember.” This line of dialogue from Edward Yang’s intimate 1991 epic epitomises its tragic story about individuals locked in the violent sway of political…

The chilled atmosphere in the basement bar of Shoreditch’s ACE hotel is spiked with a frisson of anticipation. All seats are taken and some guests sit cross-legged on the concrete floor, sipping from glasses, like they’re at a music festival. Simon Savory, founder and host of New Queer Visions, steps up to relay the running order of the night and to say that all ticket money is going to Time Out Youth – a charity based in North Carolina with a mission of, ‘empowering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.’ The reason why this particular organisation was chosen will become clear before the half-way mark. The first half ‘Looking Anew’ is composed of shorts from Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and the USA. All possess merit and magnetism but like…

MIGUEL GOMES: Two days ago, Jacques Rivette died. This was a guy who I really admired. I admired his cinema. I was reading an obituary and he once said: ‘every director who can call themself a director has the obligation not to be an author, but to create the conditions that allow a film to become a living organism.’ And he was very good at doing that. When you are writing a script, the film is not alive yet. It’s not born. It’s the beginning. I love this about movie making. It’s very exciting when you see something being born and you don’t know how to deal with it. You have to adjust. And you know that it will never be the same baby twice. You have to follow a…

Directed by SEBASTIAN SCHIPPER, Starring LAIA COSTA FREDERICK LAU FRANZ ROGOWSKI Released 1 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Another one-take wonder, this time from Germany. 4 ENJOYMENT. When it’s good, it’s really damn good. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Unwieldy by design, it does just try a little bit too hard to impress. With the rise in prominence of digital video cameras, filmmakers can shoot any old shit and then build a movie in the editing suite. Hit ‘record’, let the actors prance about for a few hours in the hope of eliciting at least a minute of gold, repeat to fade. Back in the good-old-bad-old-days when film was a valued commodity and planning was paramount, you had to know exactly what you wanted to do and say in advance. Filmmaking was a case of forming a…

Directed by DON CHEADLE, Starring DON CHEADLE EWAN MCGREGOR EMAYATZY CORINEALDI Released 22 APRIL 4 ANTICIPATION. Don Cheadle was born to play Miles Davis. 3 ENJOYMENT. The biopic nuts and bolts are rather more convincing than the increasingly exasperating comedic flights of fancy. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The ambition is plain to see, but too many false notes impact on the overall achievement. As someone who started out on the bandstand with Charlie Parker, and closed his career recording with Prince, jazz trumpet legend Miles Davis had plenty to look back on but very little interest in so doing. A guy who never played a greatest-hits set, musically he was always in the now, an ethos making him fundamentally unsuited to the usual A-to-Z Hollywood biopic. Thankfully, Don Cheadle’s long-gestating, independentlyfinanced film portrait has…

Directed by DEXTER FLETCHER, Starring TARON EGERTON HUGH JACKMAN CHRISTOPHER WALKEN Released 1 APRIL 2 ANTICIPATION. A film about the greatest loser in sport? It’s all downhill from here. 3 ENJOYMENT. A star-making turn from Egerton commands attention. 2 IN RETROSPECT. Sticks to the rule-book. What is it about Dexter Fletcher and the perils and pitfalls of paternity? His latest film as director is Eddie the Eagle, an oddly conventional biopic that uses a strained father-son relationship to frame its rabblerousing, crowd-pleasing reflection on futility. The story is a simple one: notorious ski-jumping loser Eddie Edwards overcomes his lack of talent – and ignores the advice of his disappointed dad – by competing in the 1988 Winter Olympics. Along the way, he picks up a disgruntled drunk of a coach, who becomes a…

Directed by MARK COUSINS, Starring HELENA BEREEN MARK COUSINS THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON Released 8 APRIL 2 ANTICIPATION. Set whimsy-tolerance levels to high. 4 ENJOYMENT. On the verge of laughter at the beginning, on the verge of tears by the end. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A complex and heartfelt evocation of a divided city. The most whimsically audacious move by Mark Cousins in a career fuelled by whimsical audacity is the casting of a serene old woman as the city of Belfast. I Am Belfast is part documentary poem rooted in the abstract, and part its writer/director’s specific attempt to make sense of the birthplace that he fled decades ago. Peach-clad Helena Bereen walks the streets of Belfast with an air of studied contemplation while, in voice-over, she speaks lyrical lines. Sometimes…

Directed by GAVIN HOOD, Starring HELEN MIRREN AARON PAUL ALAN RICKMAN Released 8 APRIL 2 ANTICIPATION. To drone or not to drone, that is the question. 3 ENJOYMENT. A basic conundrum; yet it’s smart, tense, and surprisingly pointed. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A last reminder of what made Alan Rickman such a gift to cinema. “Never tell a soldier the cost of war.” These are the parting words from Alan Rickman’s Lieutenant General Frank Benson in Gavin Hood’s Eye In The Sky. It’s a role that was to become the actor’s last. It’s “cost” we think of now, as we grieve his death. The kind of cost we face when, to become immortalised on the big screen, we must face our own impermanence. Movies create two selves: one human, one untouchable. Sometimes you have…

Directed by KENT JONES, Starring MARTIN SCORSESE WES ANDERSON JAMES GRAY Released 4 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. One of the great critics of our time with a stellar grouping of worldclass filmmakers. 3 ENJOYMENT. It’s hard not to be infectiously drawn in by the passion on display here. 3 IN RETROSPECT. More of a beginner’s guide than an invaluable contribution to the subject. François Truffaut’s interview compendium ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ may very well be the most sacred and beloved text in all cinephilia, and certainly the most significant for the cause of the auteur theory along with Andrew Sarris’ ‘The American Cinema’. Published in 1967, this singular volume was based on a week-long interview Truffaut conducted with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962. It isn’t just an invaluable in-depth study of one of cinema’s greatest masters, it’s also…

Directed by SEBASTIÁN SILVA, Starring SEBASTIÁN SILVA TUNDE ADEBIMPE KRISTEN WIIG Released 8 APRIL 3 ANTICIPATION. Obsessed with the title. 5 ENJOYMENT. Wears its brilliant social observations lightly and enjoyably and then with shocking audacity. 5 IN RETROSPECT. This baby should be discussed and dissected in groups of great minds. “Not having answers is a new way of living for me,” said Sebastián Silva, Nasty Baby’s writer, director and lead actor during a screening introduction at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. These words chime perfectly with a film that weaves the social tapestry of likeable, progressive people in a way that feels complex but celebratory, until the rug is pulled from under everything, turning the film from a breezy queer drama into a casual modern masterpiece. The setting is bohemian New York and…

Directed by ROBERT EGGERS, Starring ANYA TAYLOR-JOY RALPH INESON KATE DICKIE Released 11 MARCH 4 ANTICIPATION. Mega mega hype ting. 4 ENJOYMENT. Gorgeous dark art. 4 IN RETROSPECT. Its hypnotic spell lingers. The great outdoors and the composition of human faces are both wrought with crisp definition in Robert Eggers’ sumptuous debut, The Witch, which is being mis-sold as a horror film. God-fearing families, 17th century lifestyles, folkloric mystery and hauntingly grotesque tableaux are the ingredients with which Eggers plays. They are part of the iconography of horror, and the images scour themselves onto your brain thanks to their disturbing brilliance. But, simply put, there are no scares in this movie. Characters in horror films usually begin carefree and are gradually ambushed by fear. In The Witch fear defines the characters from the…

Directed by DAVID FARR, Starring CLÉMENCE POÉSY, DAVID MORRISSEY, STEPHEN CAMPBELL MOORE Released 11 MARCH “You don’t deserve that thing inside you!” It may be said in the bitter blindness of grief, but this line from The Ones Below, addressed to pregnant Kate (Clémence Poésy) by her neighbour Teresa Baker (Laura Birn), cuts to the very heart of Kate’s anxieties about maternity. A troubled family history and a difficult relationship with her own mother (Deborah Findlay) have meant that Kate has taken 10 years even to consider having a baby with husband Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore). With perfect timing, the similarly pregnant Teresa and her controlling, cleanfreak older husband Jon (David Morrissey) move into the vacant apartment downstairs. Kate immediately warms to Teresa’s devoted enthusiasm – contrasting with Kate’s own hesitancy – for…

Directed by HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT Starring YVES MONTAND CHARLES VANEL PETER VAN EYCK 1953 Released 28 MARCH Blu-ray/DVD There are bleak movies, and then there’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, a work whose eventual message is: life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering. It tells you this just before everyone and everything is blown to smithereens in a giant ball of hellfire. Unemployment prevents surly exiles from escaping a dead-end Mexican shithole. There’s nothing to do all day but sit on a step and let your whiskers grow too long. There are no nearby towns, and air tickets are prohibitively expensive. So when the unscrupulous duty manager at an American-owned oil concern announces a quick-buck job opening to transport a truck-load of highly volatile liquid explosives across mountains [cut: -ous climes in order]…

Directed by VERA CHYTILOVÁ, Starring VLADIMIR BOSAK EVA BOSÁKOVÁ JIRÍ KODET 1963 Released NOW Blu-ray Let’s quickly begin by mentioning the 43-minute feature that’s also bundled onto this disc, as it is quite brilliant. Vera Chytilová’s A Bag of Fleas mostly takes place in an all-girl dormitory with the camera adopting the perspective of one of the tenants. This means that, throughout the film, characters might flash a cheeky smile and a wink to the lens in show of female camaraderie. But this is no mere behavioural study, as the girls are all enrolled on an internship programme for a cotton mill, and they soon realise they’re trapped between the desire for personal freedom and the chance to slot seamlessly, anonymously into the communist machine of early ’60s Czechoslovakia. It’s a vivacious and…

Directed by WHIT STILLMAN, Starring TAYLOR NICHOLS CHRIS EIGEMAN MIRA SORVINO 1994 Released 18 APRIL Blu-ray Though it was one of those brave few movies to get an early DVD release, arriving in one of those crappy cardboard boxes with the awkward plastic clasp, Whit Stillman’s second feature, Barcelona, has become a complete bastard to track down. Praise be to the lords of home entertainment solutions, then, that Criterion have come charging to the rescue, including the film in a box-set package of the director’s early trilogy – along with 1990’s Metropolitan and 1998’s The Last Days of Disco. Stillman’s films are first and foremost exalted for their immaculate, urbane dialogue, but Barcelona should be praised for its ravishing depiction of the Spanish capital. It’s a unique and affectionate view of a city,…

We had an absolute blast attending the 45th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The opportunity to power through an arduous daily schedule of movies that may never make it to your local multiplex is valuable, allowing as it does a sample flavour of titles that come in all manner of mis-shapen sizes and styles. Filipino counter-culture celebrity Khanvn was in town breaking records by playing a live piano score to his 13 hour feature Simulacrum Tremendum. He was spotted the next day with plasters on all of his fingers. Elsewhere there was Fukada Koji’s Sayonara, a film whose main cast member is a female, wheelchair-bound android who is played by a real android. These weird and wonderful selections aside, this year’s festival got us thinking about the art…