An unprecedented event took place a couple of weekends ago in the Masonic Lodge of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It was a celebration not of specific timing, yet long-overdue, coming about for no particular reason, other than acquaintance and willingness on the part of all those involved. Nonetheless, it is hard to believe that no-one […]
Asghar Farhadi’s Clever And Nothing More ‘The Past’
Like Asghar Farhadi’s previous film, A Separation (2011), Le passé (The Past) is a superb feat of narrative construction and mise en scène, keeping three to four characters at the centre of attention, and balancing their motives and desires with careful equanimity. The problem is that there’s little more to recommend the film than this […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Frigid And Soulless ‘Exhibition’
A title at the end reveals that Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, is dedicated to the recently-late architect James Melvin, which should come as no surprise since the film is as much a portrait of the sleek, modernist Kensington townhouse in which it is almost exclusively set, as of the mildly dysfunctional marriage that resides […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: ‘When Evening Falls On Bucharest Or Metabolism’
Chistian Porumboiu ups the formal rigour of his last, Police, Adjective (2009), with When Evening Falls On Bucharest Or Metabolism; a film composed of 17 shots, most capturing conversations for a full reel’s 11 minutes, and filmed with an almost entirely static camera. His subjects are film director Paul and his actor and new bedmate […]
Agnès Varda’s Most Personal And Emotional Film, ‘Documenteur’
Agnès Varda has cited Documenteur as her favourite of her own films, presumably because even more than The Beaches of Agnes (2008), it is her most personal and most emotional. She was apart from her husband Demy on her second trip to Los Angeles, at the start of the ‘80s, to develop a script (turned […]