Men and Chicken

You know when you watch something and all you can think is, “What the fuck?!” Just out of Men and Chicken, a truly bizarre comedy about a group of ludicrous degenerate brothers. Mads Mikkelson is utterly unrecognisable as a gross, imbecilic compulsive masturbater. Sørren Malling is equally mad as he disciplines his brothers with slaps…

Bridgend

Well, Bridgend was the first dud of the festival for me. Still 1 out of 31 isn’t bad. It’s about the string of suicides that took place in the Welsh town of Bridgend, mostly by teenagers. Despite the dramatic and interesting subject, the film managed to be both boring and add absolutely nothing to the…

The Clan

A gangster movie about an Argentinian crime family in the 80s who took advantage of the turbulent political climate to make their money by kidnapping, ransoming then killing their victims.

Speed Sisters

As everybody knows, cars are not my favourite thing and car films are somewhere below videos on slug mating rituals on YouTube on the list of things I wanna watch, so when I say that Speed Sisters is an excellent fucking movie, you know it’s a fact. Following the highs and lows of the Palestinian…

Green Room

A fucking tense and brutal movie about a dipshit band walking in on a murder in the backroom of a white supremacist redneck bar after a gig. Never have I routed against Patrick Stewart before but he plays the neo Nazi leader with beautiful, skillful malevolence in this Assault on Precinct 13-esque siege. Well worth…

The Brand New Testament

A surreal comedy in which Catherine Deneuve pumps a gorilla. Our realm of existence is essentially a game of Sims God plays in his trackies while halfcut because he’s giant cruel deadbeat. Luckily his goth daughter is gonna come to Earth and fuck up his shit. Easy to compare in style to Amelie, but actually…

The Pearl Button

An absolutely beautiful, slow, moving documentary. The whole film is like a poem about water as a cosmological, geographical, spiritual, biological, historical force. Both personal and political, it is tells the story of Chile’s history as well as the filmmaker’s own life experiences in what becomes a song of water as a unifier between celestial…

The Propaganda Game

A documentary by one of few foreign filmmakers granted access to film in North Korea. His attempts to get a real idea of the lives the 23 million people who live in this media punchline of a country are, of course, hopelessly thwarted and the movie becomes an examination of the propaganda war surrounding the…

Demolition

A coming-to-terms-with-grief/romantic friendship Hollywood movie full of bittersweet humour. Much more entertaining than that synopsis makes it sound. If it helps, a lot of shit gets smashed with a sledgehammer in this movie.

Guilty

A crime procedural based on a real miscarriage of justice in India. While the film shows multiple versions of how crime could have been committed, what it emphasises strongly is that there is no solid evidence against those convicted of the crime, and only the echo chamber of media gossip is what’s against them.