Wild Fire begins at dawn – a liminal time of change. There is an immaculate garden surrounded by trees and full of birdsong, and beyond it a beautiful modernist home. Upstairs in the bedroom, a glass and wine bottle sit on the floor, and a silk robe lies discarded on the end of the bed….
Writer/director Nathan Buck’s Under Spanish Skies begins with a woman trying to hitch a ride on a dusty road. This is Alix (Nahéma Ricci), heading to the villa in Andalusia, Spain where her uncle Andrés (Amr Waked) lives and works as an eco engineer. Alix is young and with her whole life ahead of her,…
Sunrise first published by EyeforFilm, 3 Dec 2005 After his film The Last Laugh (1926) was met with critical rapture (if not quite box office success) in America, F.W. Murnau was lured to Hollywood by William Fox’s offer of a blank cheque and carte blanche to make any film he pleased. The result was Sunrise, loosely adapted…
Milly (Alexander Molina) is about to shoot himself in the foot. Even as he listens on his phone’s speaker to an intimate voicemail from his heavily pregnant girlfriend Emily (Monette Moio) declaring her love for him, he is getting a hand job in the front seat of his car from prostitute Kalli (Audra Alexander), and then…
Madeleine Collins had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival 2022 Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins, which he co-wrote with Héléna Kotz, begins in an upmarket department store, as a young woman (Mona Walravens), new to town, is looking for the right dress. It is a complicated choice, with elaborate criteria. The first dress that…
Trust opens with an impressionistically glimpsed and artfully effaced couple having panting, passionate sex, while a series of increasingly urgent incoming text messages (“You OK?” “Call me back.” “Call me!”) is ignored. Next we see Brooke Gatwick (Victoria Justice) returning with a suitcase to her New York apartment, where she greets Owen Shore (Matthew –…
“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…
As the titles from his filmography – Life Between the Waters (2017), The Forgotten Mountain (Mali i Harrum, 2018) and Encounter in the Air (2019) – suggest, Albanian writer/director Ardit Sadiku is an auteur of the elements. His sophomore feature opens with a spectacular vista of the sublime, in a montage of aerials revealing cloud-girt…
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…