New Movies

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada What would happen if a middle-class woman in London were pregnant with the second coming of Jesus via immaculate conception? If Debbie Tucker Green's The Second Coming is to be believed, nothing much. There'd be an argument with the husband, a best friend worrying about her mental condition, and the woman in question refusing to talk to anyone about it. A synopsis, in most cases, does not tell you the whole story of the film, it...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Monet, Renoir, Cézanne – today, these painters' and their fellow Impressionists' works are as ubiquitous and well-known as it gets, adorning calendars, mugs and coasters. But of course at the time these young artists started painting in their now recognizable style, they caused quite the stir in the art world and were seen as an abomination by the establishment. Their transformation into respectable artists was not least due to the art collector and dealer Paul Durand-Ruel....

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Saved from triteness (just) by Al Pacino's utterly gratifiying, larger than life performance, Danny Collins takes as its springboard the story of folk musician Steve Tilston who received a letter from John Lennon thirty five years too late. In an interview with a music magazine Tilston had expressed some fear over the potentially corrupting power of the riches and fame integral to the rock-star trajectory.  Lennon took issue with this and wrote to then twenty one...

By Emma Silverthorn @HouseOf_Gazelle Referred to only as The Girl: here is a heroine you can root for, a vigilante, feminist, vampire with excellent taste in music plus skateboarding ability, yes please! Not that this heroine is overtly kick-ass; she's a quiet, lonely soul but if anything this makes her even more appealing. Even the basic fact of seeing a female, (and a vulnerable looking female at that), stalking the streets at night (as opposed to being stalked), was in...

By Leslie Byron Pitt If you have a quick glance at the IMDB page of Futuro Beach director Karim Aïnouz, you would find a substantial amount of award nominations. This includes Futuro Beach being selected for the Golden Bear prize at The Berlin Film Festival. However, after sitting through the beautiful yet vacuous 106 minutes of abstract visuals and bland melodrama, it’s difficult to see why. Opening with a vigorous opening sequence of vast areas of empty beach, overseen by...

By Stephen Mayne Is it possible to escape the past and do we ever really want to? Now on their sixth feature together, Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss turn to the dark depths of Germany’s recent history to delve into a noir infused world of blind hope and half-truths. As Hoss’ concentration camp survivor struggles to reconcile new and old lives, Phoenix, hinging on a clever conceit, steadily picks up momentum towards a subtly powerful conclusion. The film opens with Auschwitz...

By Stephen Mayne  It was film that brought me to Elliott Smith, and it’s in film that director Nickolas Dylan Rossi finds him again. I was 15 and in search of something when I first came across the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums where Luke Wilson tries to take his own life. Playing over it is Needle in the Hay, a devastating song off Elliott’s second solo album. The intense pain and beauty had me hooked. That’s how it is with...

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Karidja Touré, the celebrated star of Céline Sciamma's Girlhood, looks small in the big hotel room armchair where she sits doing back-to-back interviews all day. She looks small, but not lost. She is visibly really enjoying this, soaking in every minute of this new part of her life, being an actress. She was literally cast off the street for Girlhood, but she did secretly always dream of being an actress. Karidja explained: “Sometimes when people ask...

Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Abderramahne Sissako revisits the country of his childhood, Mali, in his powerful outcry of a film. Timbuktu and the surrounding desert region were under jihadist control for about a year from 2012 to 2013. The new leaders, for the most part coming from different countries, ride around town on motorbikes and in jeeps, announcing their laws with megaphones. Football and music is forbidden, women must cover up and wear gloves, it is forbidden to smoke, to sit...