The feature debut by Johnny Barrington – who came to prominence in 2012 with the darkly surreal and funny, BAFTA-nominated short Tumult – is a strong and confident bow from a director who consistently undercuts the tenets of social realism with hints of the magical and the dreamlike. With its Scottish locale (specifically, the Isle of Lewis) and gentle genre breaking, comparisons to filmmaker Bill Forsyth are probably unavoidable. But, in the case of Silent Roar – which opened this year’s “special edition” of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (see the news) – they are probably appropriate. Dondo (Louis McCartney)…
Browsing: Film Reviews
On first glance Empty Nets may sound like a typical old-fashioned Iranian film with the oft-used tale of a poor boy in love with a rich girl. However writer-director Behrooz Karamizadeh distinguishes his film from a flurry of other socially conscious love stories by instilling political overtones and adding a visual panache. Amir (newcomer Hamid Reza Abbasi) is working as a delivery boy for a catering company in a seaside town in northern Iran. His meagre pay just about supports himself while his mother, with whom he lives, earns a little bit by making and selling homemade pickles. Amir is in love…
Is your comfort zone really still yours when you choose to share it with someone else? Does comfort equal happiness and is the present dependent on the past? These are some of the important questions raised by Filip Diviak’s 8-minute movie My Name is Edgar and I Have a Cow. With its boldly expressive style and rough hand-drawn strokes which bring sharpness to otherwise delicate watercolor textures, the Czech-Slovak co-production shines with its heartfelt humor and attention to detail. We see the world through the eyes of Edgar, a simple man living a simple life, surrounded by his favorite possessions.…
But in other ways it is, of course, completely different from that, or any other conventionally fictionalised and scripted drama. Reality’s cool, unemphasised and unsignposted dialogue goes completely against what we expect from a movie’s usual direction and editing: hitting significant dramatic beats, making important things obvious and (to quote the remark sometimes attributed to Billy Wilder) making the subtleties obvious as well. This, by contrast, is the live feed from reality, what the raw and untreated dialogue we speak sounds like when all laid out. When Winner voices concerns about her cat and dog, that might, in a conventional…
This film from British Iranian director Hassan Nazer was the British entry in the international feature section at this year’s Academy Awards; sadly it was not nominated. It is a likable, gentle comedy about two children in which an Oscar statuette plays a part: the ultimate MacGuffin, perhaps. It’s also a rather cinephile film which ponders the enormous prestige of Iranian cinema abroad. The premise is that the great Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, having boycotted the 2017 Oscars in protest at Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, cannot be there in person to pick up his Oscar for The Salesman. But…
It is the season for great scares with tons of movies for those into the horror genre. A unique film in this genre with a psychological terror spin, will be premiering October 28th, 2022 in limited theatrical release domestically and digitally on Apple iTunes. What makes this story disturbing is it based on true events in the home of the Producer, Director, and Writer William Mark McCullough. The McCullough family experienced terrifying moments that would make you ask questions about what is living inside the walls of this house. “A Savannah Haunting” is produced by innovative Emmy Award Nominee Alexis…
With the urgency of a good thriller and the clarity of a fable, World War III is the grueling but compelling tale of how one of life’s victims learns to imitate his oppressors. Largely unspooling on the set of a bad film being made about the Holocaust, Iranian Houman Seyedi’s sixth feature starts out as jet-black comedy before darkening still further into tragedy, a journey embodied in an absorbing and extraordinary central performance by Mohsen Tanabandeh as the film’s downtrodden hero. https://youtu.be/4BnUJCousqY Seyedi’s work has regularly won acclaim at home, and the premiere of World War III in Venice’s Orizzonti…
“A Hero” is the apex of Farhadi’s cinematic development. This Film exemplifies all the characteristics of Fahrad’s style and it’s the perfect example to comprehend his Cinema. While viewing “A Hero” it feels that we are witnessing everyday life events without any middlemen. Although all filmmaking elements have been arranged in detail, they are hidden from our perception. The narrative appears to be simple, however, there are numerous layers and nuances that are difficult to perceive. Every time we view this film, a new aspect of the film is discovered. The characters appear as ordinary people who are neither bad…
New York Film Festival With its tableau aesthetics and mechanical humor (in Bergsonian terms), Social Hygiene is a hilarious take on the ridiculousness of performative decorum in our social interactions. A satire of social norms and human communication in long static shots immediately reminds us of the master of this cinema, Roy Andersson, with his “human trilogy.” But Denis Cote’s film is full of dialogue, unlike the quiet cinema of Andersson. While Andersson focuses on humans’ inability to communicate with each other, Cote is more interested in how we waste words, time, and our own emotions by depending on arbitrary…
The new film by Leos Carax, the winner of Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, is a must-see, but will the audience “miss the joke,” the same way many did for similar satires, like Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)? While the first half of Annette can feel staggering, the second half is everything, narratively and stylistically. Making a satire about cancel culture, media exploitation, herd mentality, public elevation and destruction of celebrities by manufacturing mass consent, and how all of that destroy individuals and the society as a whole, in the middle of…