Hard to believe that’s the first week of the festival over. I have to say, it is very different from the usual experience. I mean, not the movies, the movies are great. But that weird sense of timelessness that the pandemic brought has been doubled-down on as I just go from film to film in…
Chinese noir about how life turns on a dime. Song Hao is a conscientious student on track for university, after years of hard work and good choices. Then he is told his university spot has been given to another student, Li Tang, his friend and the son of the corrupt mayor. Both he and his…
Archival interviews, footage, and readings in their words of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams on their work, life and friendship. They met when Truman was 16 and Tennessee 28, and formed a lifelong bond that lasted until death. The film traces their youthful exuberance in their common sentimentalities, their drifting apart with time and consuming…
Man, the knots people will tie themselves in coz they can’t hold two truths at the same time. What is so difficult about understanding that you might be being investigated for national security reasons and guilty of sex offences at the same time? This film builds this story up like it’s a mystery, was Matt…
There is a plague which causes people to have spontaneous amnesia, forgetting all of their previous life and identity. Those whose identity is lost, and who have no relatives to claim them, are entered into a rehabilitation programme, giving them daily tasks to undertake to give them an idea of what they might like and…
A beautiful documentary combining archival interviews with members of Outer Hebrides fishing communities, set to footage of their modern day descendants, and woven through it just the most haunting score. People tell stories of their memories of childhood, of characters they knew, of the coming and going of change in their world. They talk about…
The Last Ones is about a total prick who owns a mine in Lapland, and thinks he can take whatever he wants, like other people’s land and other people’s wives. It’s almost criminally boring. I’ve heard this described as Finnish Western. The mine is set up on indigenous land, with the Sami reindeer herders in…
Speaking of toxic masculinity. Shorta (the Arabic word for polis) is about two policemen getting trapped in the ghetto during a riot of their own making. It’s hard to know who you are supposed to be rooting for in this, both cops are such absolute cunts. And then they pick up some poor bastard and…
Brutal. That was so much darker than I thought it was gonna be. It starts with the murder of a teenager and the stabbing of two of his friends by a fellow classmate. In Malaysia teenagers stabbing each other actually makes headline news, and the intro follows the story blow up, as people call for…
A fella’s dad insists that he not be buried on a rainy day, so the prodigal son, who returned only to see him off, is stuck in this shithole town waiting for the weather to clear before he can do this one last act before he commits suicide. Went from a strong start with really…