This is unashamedly unconventional, but in a fan rather than snooty way. Using (mostly) just diegetic sound from the post-production of a fictional mid-70s Italian horror movie, Peter Strickland has followed his superb debut, Katalin Varga [2009], with a largely non-narrative nightmare hymn both to the electronic soundtrack experiments of that time, and to the […]
AFI FEST
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: The Angel’s Share (Dir. Ken Loach UK/France/Belgium/Italy 2012 )
There are pockets of whimsy in the Ken Loach filmography, but following 2009’s Looking for Eric, he seems more fully than ever to be embracing an Ealing-inflected lightheartedness. The Angel’s Share starts off in reasonably familiar territory, as a succession of poor, unemployed Scots have their petty crimes recounted in court, and the community service […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: ‘Rise Of The Guardians’
Rise of the Guardians feels so familiar, like a piece of childhood come back to life on screen, that you cannot help but fall in love with the characters, fantastical or real in the form of children.
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: A Highjacking (Kapringen) (Dir. Tobias Lindholm Denmark 2012 )
Director Tobias Lindholm’s first feature film R was a gritty prison drama that upheaved the generic genre conventions that came before. His second feature takes a drastic look at a very topical subject, and one very much ignored in detail in the media–except for the sensationalizing of pirates sailing the open sea. A Highjacking is […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Antiviral (Dir. Brandon Cronenberg USA/Canada 2012 )
If nothing else, Brandon Cronenberg has been quite unafraid to make a film that could pass for an earlier one of his father’s. Antiviral boasts a fertile premise that ties biological interference to celebrity obsession, is very handsomely mounted, and features a fine, committed performance from Caleb Landry Jones in the lead. But the title […]