From the outset, The Woman With Leopard Shoes (La Femme aux Chaussures Leopard) both does and does not let us know what kind of film it is going to be. As an unseen woman recruits a burglar who is wearing a hood over his head to prevent him identifying her, the scene unfolds not only…
“Thank you, have a good day!”, are the opening lines of limping Chang-bok (Yoo Jae-myung) as he sells eggs in a marketplace with his mute sidekick Tae-in (Yoo Ah-in, Burning, 2018) – and indeed, the friendliness of his words is complemented by the all-round sunniness of writer/director Hong Eui-jeong feature debut Voice of Silence (Sorido…
Limbo begins with a smile, and with a cautionary tale about the mixed signals that a smile can send. Its first image is a large, crudely chalked smiley-face on a blackboard, as Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard) rôle-play a scenario in which a man on the dance floor misconstrues a woman’s smile…
At the centre of Parallel Minds is a classic locked-room mystery. Some time not far into the future, Elise Perrott (Michelle Thrush) and her research assistant Margo Elson (Tommie-Amber Pirie) are racing to complete a pioneering technology called Red Eye – special contact lenses which enable people both to download their memories into a Universal…
“This had better be fucking good,” says police officer Catrin (Annes Elwy) at the beginning of Ryan Andrew Hooper’s feature debut The Toll, as she steps into the portable cabin where the Toll Booth Man (Michael Smiley) conducts his business. The latter – a dry, taciturn anonym – has been leading an equally anonymous life,…
On a desolate goat farm out in rural Thurber, Texas, the Straker family’s elderly patriarch David (Michael Zagst) lies in bed, ill and dying. Yet it is not just death that stalks this property in Bryan Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked. For something is spooking the goats in their barn at night, and between…
“I can’t breathe,” 19-year-old Talib Ben Hassi (Jack Pedersen) shouts repeatedly, as police officers hold him down in a cell. With those three words right at the beginning of Shorta, writer/directors’ Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm evoke the phrase used by Eric Garner and many other African-Americans before they died at the hands of…
“Do you remember what it was like in the beginning, before all of this?”, Allison (Aubrey Plaza, Life After Beth) will ask near the end of Black Bear written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine whose previous feature, Wild Canaries (2014), also boasted a bestial title. “We were so happy,” Allison continues, “I just want…
Keane first published by musicOMH Two people sit on a bench at a train station, in what will probably be the last few moments they share before parting company forever. “It’s okay, I love you”, she says. “I love you too”, he replies, a single tear rolling down his cheek. This might be the closing…
“Are you sure you want to keep it?”, 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) asks Anna (Carla Philip Røder), the pregnant girlfriend of her cousin David (Elliott Crosset Hove), in Jeanette Nordahl’s feature debut Wildland. “Maybe he doesn’t even want to be a dad.” It is a peculiarly inappropriate thing to ask a young, excitedly expectant…
Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s feature debut opens with actual black-and-white newsreel footage of pioneering Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin arriving in Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb of Paris, before a cheering crowd of Caucasian locals. There, in 1963, he ceremonially inaugurated a housing project that bore his name, the Cité Gagarine – a groundbreaking socialist hero…