Screens at CIFF: 10/20 & 10/22World premiere: 12 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival Firstly, Jafar Panahi isn’t supposed to be making films at all. This is something that everybody knows who cares about Iranian film at all, of course, and it doesn’t need repeating, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/21World premiere: 29 September, 2012, CNEX Documentary Film Festival It’s not the exact literal first thing that happens in Mothers, but it’s awfully early on that director Xu Hui-jing, in voice-over, explains his particular relationship to China’s “One Child” population control policy: he was the second child born to his […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/21 & 10/23World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival The documentary Stop-Over begins with what’s far too swift and deadly to call it a sucker punch: more like a stiletto darted into the heart. Kaveh Bakhtiari’s first feature-length project starts with a filmed conversation about the rough life of an […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/21 & 10/22 & 10/23World premiere: 28 June, 2013, Taipei Film Festival The most unsettling moment in Soul – a movie in which unsettling things are not rare – comes when a young man, Wang A-Chuan (Joseph Chang), having already demonstrated his crazy-bastard bona fides to us is confronted by his father […]
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: 10/18 & 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 […]
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 […]
