Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/20World premiere: 19 October, 2013, Chicago International Film Festival I should open with the disclaimer that I’m not sure if the version of H4 screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, and thus the version that I’m reviewing, has been completed. There are places where the sound mix has a […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/21World premiere: 16 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival A third of the way through Heli, one might almost inevitably find it a purposeless noodle through the Mexican countryside with scenes that clearly have no connection to each other and random insert shots of things we’ll never need to think […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/19World premiere: 21 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival I suppose if the situation was reversed, and The German Doctor was the movie that I think I want it to be, then I’d be bitching in the other direction: that the film was a hopelessly tacky and crass and exploitative […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/19 & 10/20World premiere: 9 August, 2013, South Africa The ability to completely discombobulate the audience is one that any good thriller-make should count among their skills, and with Of Good Report, director Jahmil X.T. Qubanka proves that he has that down cold. Lord knows it’s not the first film […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 & 10/21World premiere: 28 January, 2013, Göteborg International Film Festival There was a time, believe it or not, when 70 minutes or so was considered quite a fine running time for a feature film – certainly on the short side of things rather than the long side, but common […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 We like animation around these parts. In case that needed clarifying, or something. In that capacity, one of my favorite things year after year is to check out the collection of animated shorts curated by the Chicago International Film Festival, and after having been unable to make that work […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 & 10/21World premiere: 11 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival The Argentine coming-of-age psychodrama in static long takes La Paz treads in so many clichés that I honestly don’t know if it avoids tracking all of them all over the nice clean movie theater, let alone how it avoids […]
The kind of film writing that starts with “it’s the Oscar time of year and I want to discuss a movie’s Oscar prospects” is one that I actively try to eschew, because it’s not really reviewing, it’s gossip. That being said, I hope that nobody minds if I do it on very rare occasions, because […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/17 & 10/20World premiere: 8 March, 2013, South by Southwest Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best After Dark Film Any doubt that Cheap Thrills, E.L. Katz’s directorial debut (after writing several screenplays director Adam Wingard, major player in the somewhat incestuous indie horror boom going on right now), would […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/20 & 10/22 World premiere: 29 September, 2013, Hamburg Film Festival Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Actress (Nadeshda Brennicke) The temptation to make all true-life stories about criminals valorised in the media the full-on Bonnie and Clyde treatment is as alive and well in Europe as in the […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/18 & 10/19World premiere: 3 July, 2013, Karlovy Vary Film Festival Special Mention by the Festival jury for Molnár Piroska Szász János’s The Notebook is an immensely handsome movie, and it is a movie about two children surviving World War II at the expense of their childlike innocence, and if […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival There is a great deal to be said about The Last of the Unjust, and since it is three hours and 38 minutes long, this is a good thing – if one invested that kind of time in watching a movie and […]
