Film

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...

by Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada Girlhood is the story of Marième's journey from obedient child to defiant girl gang member to young adult fending for herself. It is a story of black female teenagers in the suburbs of Paris. It is a story of female friendship. It is a story of strength, of finding your way out. Marième grows up with many restrictions. Her mother is mostly at work, leaving her to look after her two younger sisters. Her older brother...

By Emma Silverthorn  @HouseOf_Gazelle Coming out tales are up my filmic street. I loved the subject treatment in Appropriate Behaviour and The Way He Looks, (though both these films are about much more than sexual discovery), which sadly threw Silent Youth into an especially sad shade. The film details a chance encounter of two lonely boys wandering the streets of Berlin through the night and into the early hours of the morning, an encounter that develops into an awkward romance....

By Miranda Schiller @mirandadadada  The title is misleading. There is no exit for Ling, a lonely, middle-aged woman whom this film follows around her incredibly depressing day-to-day life. Since she rarely speaks to anyone, there is hardly any dialogue, and scenes of her trying to fix the peeling wallpaper of her flat with sello-tape, going to the toilet or staring into space are drawn out exactly as long as they take in real life, on a particularly listless day. Exit...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Roy Andersson’s films are so uniquely his own it’s hard to reconcile them with the world around us. Yet were anyone to venture into the idiosyncratic Swedish director’s head, I strongly suspect they would reveal themselves as a weirdly precise form of documentary filmmaking. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, the third in his loosely connected “living” trilogy, resembles a world watched from afar by a viewer not completely familiar with the ways...

By Dr Katy Shaw ‘There is nothing in this film you don’t already know’ declares Russell Brand in the opening scene of Michael Winterbottom’s new movie about the 2007-8 financial crisis Emperor’s New Clothes. A joint project between heavy-weights of the directing and comedy worlds, the movie’s main focus is the financial crash of 2007-8 and its consequences, from bankers’ bonuses at HSBC and Citibank, to the Occupy movement, corporate tax-dodging by Vodaphone and Apple, the privatisation of housing and zero hours contracts....