Sergey Loznitsa’s latest offering, A Gentle Creature, is an exercise in suffering. A gruelling odyssey that delves the depths of the human spirit, that by the film’s end leaves you coming up gasping for air. Derived from the title of a Dostoevsky short story, Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature, which competed...
Pre-teen Barbara (Madison Wolfe) defends her sleepy new-jersey town from the perils of menacing giants whilst struggling with her own personal trauma in Anders Walter’s fantasy-drama debut feature, I Kill Giants. Directed by Anders Walter and coming from comic book writer and penciller Joe Kelly’s (whose previous work includes involvement...
Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe’s documentary, MAMIL: Middle Aged Men in Lycra, about middle-aged male cycling enthusiasts is no tour de force. Coming from directing duo Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe, MAMIL, which divides its time between the many physical iterations of its acronym (Middle Aged Men In Lycra) dotted...
Part eco-documentary, part sociological examination, Mike Day’s The Islands and the Whales uses the controversial whale hunting tradition of the Faroese as a diving board to plunge headfirst into the isolated, North Atlantic community of the Faroe Islands. Through an intimate, fly on the wall approach, Day follows the everyday...
Kore-eda Hirokazu intrigues with his investigative crime drama, The Third Murder, but the film falls prey to contrivances that sell it short. When Misumi (Yakusho Kôji), an employee at a food packaging plant, confesses to the murder of his boss, hot-shot lawyer Shigemori (Fukuyama Masaharu) is brought on to take...
In Have a Nice Day, Liu Jian has created a world of multiple dimensions in the 2D renderings of a seedy southern China fringe town where lives intersect over a bag of cold hard cash. A suitable alternative title for this pulpy, crime-caper animation would be, “In the Mood for...
Ruben Östlund’s mountain set ski drama, Force Majeure, landed with a bang at Cannes in 2014 and was quickly blanketed by an avalanche of critical success. Three years’ later, the Swedish born director returned and took home the festival’s top prize with The Square, a biting satire of the art...
Alex Garland’s seat at the directors table is one that he has worked for. Before he cut his teeth behind the camera with the superbly crafted sci-fi techno thriller, Ex Machina, Garland penned novels and screenplays, the likes of which, The Beach and 28 Days Later, have cemented themselves as...
Warwick Thornton’s feature debut, Samson and Delilah, a sensitive, sad tale of two Aboriginal lovers living in Alice Springs, took home the Camera d’Or at Cannes and introduced an emerging talent to the stable of promising Australian directors. The 47-year-old cinematic jack of all trades, often serving as both Director and cinematographer on his...