Leftover Women
LEFTOVER WOMEN asks the viewer to observe and understand the stigma Chinese women face within their set of broader social and cultural circumstances, which it then does well to represent.
Category Archives: Reviews
The County
Grimur Hakonarson and his DP Mart Taniel make full use of the Icelandic climate and landscape at their disposal along with other, subtler and often more comic ideas. Andrew Nickolds reviews.
Tigertail
With ambitious and emotional scope and an elegantly muted central performance from Tzi Ma, Alan Yang’s debut feature TIGERTAIL is a reflective and wistful immigration story that attempts to carry more than its pastiche styling can bear in a slender 90 minutes. TIGERTAIL oscillates between the present and past, articulated through the extensive memory-flashbacks of … Continue reading Tigertail
Born in Evin
BORN IN EVIN follows Maryam Zaree, an actress and filmmaker, on her moving journey to discover more about her past. Maryam was born in prison during the 1983 climax of the Iranian Cultural Revolution, where her mother & father were both imprisoned.
Radio Silence
RADIO SILENCE is a documentary that gives a voice to those that have had theirs stripped away.
Mr. Jones
Directed by Agnieszka Holland, MR. JONES is the largely untold real-life story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and a slow-moving and chilling historical drama. Set in the early 1930s, MR. JONES excels by telling the story of Jones’s perilous venture into Ukraine, which led to Jones becoming the first Western journalist to widely expose the … Continue reading Mr. Jones
The Whistlers
Corneliu Porumboiu’s THE WHISTLERS introduces us to the real-life whistling language El Silbo spoken by the film’s characters as betrayal and romance play out against the grand vistas of the Canary Islands.
Ema
EMA is noteworthy as a study of a great, possessive and possessing performance; and as a dance movie whose dance sequences relate to the substance of the narrative. But as a study of a character, EMA joins Larraín’s gallery of films about subjects he seeks to control – and cannot.
The Assistant
THE ASSISTANT lingers, and not because it generates an incandescent rage. Instead, it simmers with a sense of quiet injustice and insidious malfeasance, which is communicated powerfully by Kitty Green, Julia Garner, and the creative team.
Focus On: It’s Always Fair Weather
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, the last of the Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly collaborations, has the temerity to admit something we all know to be true: namely, that life can be a bit shit.