One wouldn’t necessarily guess it, but A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a collaborative effort by two of the leading lights of international experimental film, Ben Rivers (UK) and Ben Russell (US), is an enquiry as to where utopia(s) may exist (as noted in interviews and screening introductions). Possible locations, it is suggested, are […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Extravagant Claims Of ‘R100’
The title R100 is a joke on the ratings system because director Hitoshi Matsumoto (Big Man Japan, 1997) claims that no-one who has not lived a century will understand this film. Such a pronouncement is in keeping with the striving absurdity of the movie, which is frequently funny, but overall a slightly laboured litany of […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Cinematic-Romantic In ‘Vic + Flo Saw A Bear’
Vic + Flo Saw A Bear is something like an expansion on Denis Côté’s last, the strictly observational non-documentary Bestiaire (2012), although that in turn was a distillation of his favoured practice of looking at slightly odd characters shut away from the world. In Curling (2010) and Carcasses (2009), for example, it was by their […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: Cannes Un Certain Regard Winner ‘L’Inconnu Du Lac’
It’s understandable that Alain Guiraudie won the best director of Un certain regard at Cannes this year, since for the most part L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) is a very tight piece of work, effectively exploring the time and place of a single location and milieu, charting the uncertainties that blossom as a […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: A Perfectly Enjoyable, Meaningless Good Time With ‘Tom At The Farm’
Wunderkind Xavier Dolan never seems to make it to the AFI festival because he’s always off shooting his next movie (four movies by the age of 24 and Cannes prizes galore). He was in production on this one when last year’s Laurence Anyways screened, a continuation and expansion of the high-pitched emotional drama of his […]
