It’d be best to be prepared before going into this, for a long slow evening. Amongst the various aims of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new film is the conjuring of the strange all-night atmosphere experienced by a group of officials in search for a dead body, based on the experiences of his co-screenwriter, Ercan Kesel, a […]
Film Festival
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: The Loneliest Planet (Dir. Julia Loktev, 2011, USA/Germany)
This is really a one idea movie, but it’s a very good idea (taken from a short story by Tom Bissell). Nica and Alex are young travelers in Georgia, engaged to be married, who depart on a trek with mountain guide Dato. And then Something Happens. To explain the Something would be to spoil the […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: Nightmare Alley (Dir. Edmund Goulding, 1947, USA)
A real Hollywood oddity, this is a cracking carnival noir charting the rise and fall of hubristic mentalist Stanton Carlisle – Stanton the Great – from cheap clairvoyant-act barker to quasi-religious swarmi, to.. well, that’d be spoiling it, but by the look on Tyrone Power’s face, he knew it had to be. Power plays […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: Coriolanus (Dir. Ralph Fiennes 2011 UK)
Shakespearian plays have been adapted for the screen time and time again. “Othello”, “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Tempest”, the list goes on an on and the familiarity for a viewer with these stories is established before they ever enter the theatre. “Coriolanus” is a lesser know, and lesser adapted, play Shakespeare wrote. Well-known actor […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: This Is Not A Film (Dir. Jafar Panahi, 2010, Iran)
This is most definitely a film, a wonderful, essential conjuring of something from nothing, a necessity for the film-maker, and the selfless defiance of a repressive regime. The Iranian government has banned director Jafar Panahi from film-making or from leaving the country for twenty years, and at the time of this film’s making, he was […]