My favourite movie of the festival by a country mile! Laugh out loud funny. There’s another showing tomorrow, if you can possibly go, do so. It’s about hardcore Game Master Weidemeyer facing off against his geek chic nemesis. Honestly, GO!
Author: gffreviews
-
Miss Violence
Well that was depressing. A long look at a family under the thumb of the paternal tyrant, who turns out to be a paedophile, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Grim.
-
A Thousand Times Goodnight
The first scenes are so beautiful the rest of the film couldn’t help but be a let down. It was actually a bit hokey, despite excellent performances from Juliet Binoche and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (that’s Jaime Lannister to you and me). It’s about a photojournalist trying to get a good work-life balance, which is actually incredibly boring compared to the questions of culpability thrown up in the first scene.
-
The Congress
Best movie of the festival I’ve seen so far. Psychedelic sci-fi about copyright and consciousness, switching between animation and live action. Simply, it’s a surreal fairytale, ideal for those that enjoyed something like Spirited Away. But the plot’s springboard is more about the idea of marketable fantasy, not celloid but chemical, a sort of lo-fi Matrix.
-
The Last of the Unjust
A 4 hour documentary on the Holocaust. Is it okay to say it was boring? There were four other people in the cinema with me, one of whom fell asleep and started snoring over the film.
To me it felt bloated, overlong and self-indulgent. Just because the subject is important doesn’t mean your three thousand panning shots of fields and building exteriors are. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that might as well have been on the radio, for all the visuals added to it. And it didn’t even have the coherent quality of simply allowing the central figure to speak, to make it a 4 hour long monologue, because of the constant interruptions for this date, that date. The whole way it was made just irritated me.
-
The Book Thief
Very true to the book, I liked that they kept Death as the narrator.
-
The Hour of the Lynx
Kinda went nowhere, but was enjoyable all the same, it’s best feature being Søren Malling’s performance.
-
The Quispe Girls
One of *those* films, where people ask, “Who will buy our cheese?” for 2 hours. Very beautiful all the same, with extra points for featuring enthusiastic Chilean herding dogs and a goat wearing a cardigan.
-
Mystery Road
A slow-burning Western set in an Australian Aboriginal community, in which every scene seethes with threat but plays out subtle and slow. Excellent if you like something like No Country For Old Men.
-
Ilo Ilo
A really good film about a maid, the family she works for and their little shit of a boy, and how they weather the financial crisis of 1997. Touching and tinged with humour, recommend!