Home first published by Film4 Summary: Ursula Meier’s feature debut is a surreal drama depicting a family frozen to the spot by the oncoming headlights of progress. Review: The open highway stretches to the horizon in both directions, promising all the freedom, and all the narrative mobility, of a road movie. Yet with her big-screen feature debut…
The Notorious Bettie Page first published by musicOMH Times Square, 1955. A shifty looking fellow casts his eye over shelves of ‘glamour’ magazines before working up the courage to ask the shopkeeper if beneath the counter there is something a little different, “with unusual material that shows restraint”. No sooner has the shopkeeper obliged with…
2 Days In New York first published by Film4 Summary: Julie Delpy’s sequel to 2 Days In Paris is a witty, irreverently coarse cross-cultural comedy about divorce, ageing and endings. Review: “Maybe this is a little too much,” declares Mingus (Chris Rock) to live-in girlfriend Marion (Julie Delpy) near the beginning of 2 Day In New…
2 Days In Paris first published by Film4 Summary: Julie Delpy’s second feature as director is a risqué post-romantic comedy set in the City of Love. Review: In 2004, acclaimed actress Julie Delpy was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing Richard Linklater’s wonderful Before Sunset (in which she also starred). In the meantime, Delpy had been…
The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) first published by EyeforFilm “Don’t worry. Nothing happened.” So says Juan Manuel (Daniel Genoud) after his cousin Véronica (María Onetto) has declared her conviction that she has struck and possibly killed a boy while out driving by a canal. By this point, about halfway through The Headless Woman…
In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau) first published by Movie Gazette Esther (Marina de Van) is a dedicated and successful research analyst, thinking about buying an apartment together with her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas). One night, bored at a party, Esther wanders out into the building site outside, where she trips and falls over. Returning…
Surveillance first published by Little White Lies At the core of Surveillance is Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), an eight-year-old girl who has witnessed “some things children shouldn’t see”, and who has been ignored ever since by every adult she has tried to tell. She might even, at a stretch, be regarded as a figure for the…
Wendy and Lucy first published by EyeforFilm “I’m lost”. They are the words that Wendy (Michelle Williams) writes on makeshift posters, alongside a picture of her missing dog Lucy – and they are words that apply equally to herself, and more broadly, to America’s dispossessed underclass. En route from Indiana to Alaska hoping to get…
The Black Forest first published by EyeforFilm There have been two recent films called The Black Forest, only one of which was horror. You might expect the horror film to have been this one, written and directed by Ruth Platt, not least because her feature debut was The Lesson (2015), a highly literate take on the prison-house…
Kursk: The Last Mission first published by Little White Lies As the opening credits – white on a blank black background – roll, we hear watery sounds, and a gasping inhalation. Young Misha (Artemiy Spiridonov) appears in medium close-up, completely underwater, and the arm of Mikhail Averin (Matthias Schoenaerts) moves in front of his face…
Cat Sticks first published by EyeforFilm “This is to call my dead friends back from the night.” After this text that suggests first-time writer/director Ronny Sen has a similarly personal relationship to his material as Philip K. Dick had to his A Scanner Darkly, and after title credits accompanied by abstractly animated rainfall, Cat Sticks…