A Family first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 To watch Jayden Stevens’ feature debut, you would never know where the director comes from. For like Ariel Kleiman’s Partisan (2015) and Steven Kastrissios’ Bloodlands (2017), A Family is an Australian film unfolding in Eastern Europe – in this case Ukraine, with…
Chloe first published by Sight & Sound, March 2010 Review: Atom Egoyan is not only one of Canada’s most consistently engaging directors, but also a very talented writer, responsible for the screenplays (whether original or adapted) of all his features from Next of Kin (1984) through to Adoration (2008). So when the eponymous sex worker…
Nathalie… first published by Movie Gazette The complicated dynamics of the relationship between husband, wife and lover have been explored time and time again by French cinema, but director Anne Fontaine manages to find a new feminist variation on this theme in Nathalie…, which she co-wrote with Jacques Fieschi. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) and Bernard (Gérard…
“There must be another way,” says Abe (Nabil Elouahabi) in Promise. “He was our child.” Abe and his wife Sarah (Rebecca Callard) have been trying to have a baby for years, but Sarah lacks progesterone, and has recently miscarried. So the interracial couple makes a reciprocal agreement with Syrian refugee Hajar (Lara Sawalha): if she…
It is not uncommon for expectant mothers to experience anxieties about the life forms – both part of them and alien from them – that they are carrying inside, and as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the Alien franchise and Paul Solet’s Grace (2009) have all in their different ways demonstrated, genre cinema is adept…