If It Were Love
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: If It Were Love (Patric Chiha)

If It Were Love is filmed theater, and by filmed theater that does not mean the stage, but the process, the transitions, and the trying…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi)

Unlike his previous Golden Bear recipient Fire at Sea, supposed Italian master Gianfranco Rosi’s follow-up Notturno feels like a shallow adventure through a war-torn world….

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Posted in Festival Review

‘Treasures’ Section of the London Film Festival

In addition to the number of exciting new screenings at the BFI London Film Festival this year, are three ‘Treasures’. Meticulous restorations of older works…

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Wolfwalkers
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart)

One can easily imagine the turning heads of Disney and Pixar, for instance, as the batwing doors swing open and a new pretender to the…

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After Love
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: After Love (Aleem Khan)

It took me a while to place the faces of actresses Joanna Scanlan and Nathalie Richard as I was immersed in After Love. One of…

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Posted in Festival Interview

LFF Interview: Arie and Chuko Esiri talk about their startling emigration story Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s debut feature Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) is a bold, superbly directed diptych of two Nigerians planning to emigrate from Lagos….

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)

In a world where the sordid inhumanity of corporate dealings has become literalised in transactions of murder and blood, Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is a…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Zanka Contact (Ismaël El Iraki)

Zanka Contact is a film deliberately built upon clichés. Its protagonists, Rajaes (Khansa Batma) and Larsen (Ahmed Hammoud) are a prostitute and a faded, drug-addicted guitarist…

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Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)

I had a few thoughts after the first song of American Utopia finished. The first was a sort of awe at Spike Lee’s direction, which…

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Shadow Country
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Shadow Country / Krajina ve stínu (Bohdan Sláma)

The harrowing, unimaginable consequences of war might well be a sub-genre of its own. Personal trauma, physical injuries, a life-long toll. While fuzzing helicopter propellers…

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Druk
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Another Round / Druk (Thomas Vinterberg)

Mads Mikkelsen and Thomas Vinterberg seem made for each other. Building from the dizzyingly visceral realism of his early masterpiece Festen (1998), Vinterberg has always…

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Relic
Posted in Festival Horror Review

LFF Review: Relic (Natalie Erika James)

In 2018, at our very own Femme Filmmakers Festival, a spooky film of just 9 minutes captured chilling themes of aging isolation and childhood relics….

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Bloody Nose
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross)

It is often said that hanging out with drunk people is unbearable when you’re sober. Drunkenness is  a different state of being: it permits things…

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Eyimofe
Posted in Festival Review

LFF Review: This Is My Desire [Eyimofe] (Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri)

Arie and Chuko Esiri‘s first feature is a uniquely elegant one. It signals the start, I hope, of two brilliant careers. Indeed, the sheer artfulness…

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