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 […]
Movies
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 Collaborative Vision In ‘A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness’
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]