A simple story enlivened by a fantastic ending, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Grisgris feels goes political too little too late. Westerners may find the Chadian setting exotic and the lead’s frenetic dance skills novel, but everything else about this plot has been done to death by arty ... Read More »
Paolo Sorrentino is a bit of a darling of the Cannes Film Festival. The Italian exhibitionist’s last four films have all screened in competition, with his phenomenal political drama/pop music video Il Divotaking the Jury Prize in 2008. While 2006’s The Family Friend was a disappo... Read More »
It pays off to know Nicolas Winding Refn’s back catalogue before walking into Only God Forgives and expecting a follow-up to 2011’s Drive. Returning to the Croisette with his ninth feature, the Danish auteur reveals himself to be the obsessive, style-driven director we saw in Val... Read More »
The majority of Rithy Panh's cinematic output remembers and represents the period of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) and the genocide that resulted during its reign. In the process, Panh has developed a filmography that explores the limits of documentary film codes and convent... Read More »
Adolfo Alix Jr.'s Death March is about the eponymous march forced upon the more than seventy thousand Philippine and American soldiers alike by the Japanese following the Battle of Bataan and their surrender in April 1942 during World War II. The film is bookended by captions tha... Read More »
What Bob Dylan did to folk music, the Coens have done to Bob Dylan. Ripping the biopic out of stodgy fact-checking, the Coens have reinvented the Dylan story by following the adventures of a singer-songwriter who could have become Bob Dylan. Cyclical, discursive, and entirely or... Read More »
The celebratory omnibus film Bombay Talkies was made for the centenary of Indian cinema (1913-2013). It brings together an eclectic group of filmmakers to pay homage to what has been made in the past and to look forward to the continuing developments of this incredible cinema and... Read More »
Perhaps there is a required fossilization period before a genre’s tropes are considered classic rather than clichéd. In 2010’s 13 Assassins, Takashi Miike told a samurai story straight and from the gut (no seppuku pun intended). The ronin canon is ancient when compared to the pol... Read More »
What previous Coens ventures to compare Inside Llewyn Davis to? It has the heart of True Grit, the eccentricity of Lebowski and the themes of A Serious Man. It shows the exquisite feel for its period that Miller’s Crossing demonstrated. It shares the ability to craft worlds throu... Read More »
Based on the real-life ‘Bling Ring’, a gang of rebellious upper-middle class LA teens whose obsession with the celebrity lifestyle led them to start burglarising A-listers’ homes when gossip websites reported they were out of town, the film attempts to deconstruct concepts of fam... Read More »
“And they descended upon earth to strengthen their ranks” appears onscreen at the start of Alex van Warnerdam’s Borgman, a Dutch dark comedy that undercuts its serious epigraph before circling back to high-minded allegory. When Borgman is funny, its jaw-droppingly, funny, a breat... Read More »
