Samuel’s Travels (aka Squeal) opens with a confusion of signals. The credits handwritten on parchment in inked calligraphy, and the jaunty grace of the accompanying Minuet from Handel’s Water Music Suite No.1 in F Major, combine to suggest a couple’s choreography, told in a classical, literary mode – which is not an unfair description of…
Secretary (2002) first published by Movie Gazette In the typical romantic comedy, a woman meets her ideal man, and after being separated from him by a range of comic trials, eventually marries him, with the prospect of happiness for ever after. So Steven Shainberg‘s directorial debut Secretary belongs to the same genre as, say, The…
“I am married to a lunatic.” So says Mara (Cristine Reyes) of her missing husband as she is interviewed by a police officer at the beginning of writer/director Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s UnTrue – and before she even launches into her story of a marriage marred by unstable behaviour and domestic violence, the horrific bruising across…
La Prisonnière first published by Little White Lies, as the 53rd instalment in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Josée (Elisabeth Wiener) and Gilbert (Bernard Fresson) live art – literally so, given that the Parisian apartment where they live their lives together also serves as the atelier where Gilbert produces his contemporary sculptures. It is not unusual for…
Review first published by Grolsch FilmWorks A figure (Edward Akrout), his face obscured, walks in a leafy suburban street at night. He pauses, significantly, to tie his shoelace (in a film full of knots and twine), before using a cut key to sneak into an immaculate middle-class home. On his way upstairs towards the sound…