COPING MECHANISMS is a strong selection of shorts. ESFF has collated an engaging programme which raises a number of important questions and rebuts pre-existing stereotypes around underrepresented issues such as disability and mental health.
EARTHRISE offers a sobering reminder of just how small we are – and a blissful portrayal of just how far we’ve come.
THE BEACH BUM is an interesting insight into Korine’s development as an equivocal filmmaker, and while THE BEACH BUM is more restrained than its aesthetic demands, there is a hypnotic quality that lingers into the credits. Steph Brown reviews.
PAUSE is most certainly deserving of the awards it has won, and perhaps others, for its impeccable representation of a story that we as an audience often assume and take for granted.
The SHORTS TO FEAR collection is compiled of four works, each with their own style, and all more twisted and unsettling than the last.
Frank Borzage won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Director in 1927 for 7TH HEAVEN and it’s not hard to see why. A full-blooded romantic melodrama, it gave the ripest of plum parts to Janet Gaynor.
BLACK NARCISSUS creeps along beside you until you realise something’s not quite right before, sometimes comically, leading you into an unnerving horror-verse, which slowly builds with the ringing bells and the beating of the village drums.
FIRST A GIRL: a British musical comedy with well-staged song and dance numbers, a properly comic script and a collection of fine performers orbiting around its talented and charismatic star, Jessie Matthews.
Set in Senegal’s capital Dakar, this highly atmospheric Cannes prizewinner combines romance and social drama with an unconventional ghost story.
Not once does THE LIGHTHOUSE feel stale, complete with fart jokes, seagull attacks and some hilarious drunken moments. April McIntyre reviews.
