Keep Going is a cowboy movie of a kind. Two partners cross the Kyrgyzstan steppe on horseback. An angry young man and his estranged mother, struggling to find common ground across this trying journey. In another way it is a love story, of a man letting go of years of resentment and allowing himself to…
Werewolf is set in the absolute chaos following the liberation of the concentration camps. The prisoners, the Nazis and their brutal attack dogs flee into the surrounding countryside. A group of children are set up in an abandoned mansion, and told to waited for supplies once Allied lines are solidified. But the food never comes,…
The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary about a journalist’s struggle to uncover the decades-long mass surveillance of her hometown community of Muslim Arab-Americans in Bearview, Illinois. In some ways the film ends up focusing more on her than on the subject she’s covering because she can never concretely get tangible proof and the…
Magical realism from Sweden, Border is based on a short story by John Ajvide Linquist, author of Let The Right One In. Tina is half sniffer dog, half woman, capable of smelling deception. She works at border control where she uses her talent to stop ne’erdowells. From there the story forks into her helping track…
Aquarela started 15 minutes late because the producer decided to introduce the movie by giving its entire thesis. As she did so, I had a sinking feeling the movie might be shit. This was compounded when the opening theme music, repeated intermittently throughout the film, was a bash of utterly shit nu metal. When it…
Spotted myself in the crowd at the Opening Gala. Can you spot yourself?
A movie based on the Flannan Isle Mystery. It has a 3 scene cameo from my favourite pencil-necked, blue-eyed psychopath Soren Malling, which almost steals the show for understated ratcheting of tension. Much in the same vein as Shallow Grave and A Simple Plan, it has an element of conflict injected into a tight group,…
Family politics in 19th century Vietnam as a wealthy silk producer gets himself a 14-year-old for his third wife. The Third Wife is everything you’d expect in historical drama set in East Asia – sumptuous gowns, sensuous filming, candlelit sex scenes.
A movie that could not be more relevant to the current newscycle, Dear Son is about a father searching for answers after his son up and runs off to Syria. A vividly drawn picture of an ordinary family undergoing the ordinary issue of a teenager making a bad decision, painting the ecstatics of betrayal and…
An Indian retelling of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Kia, an autistic teenage girl, investigates the death of Cosmos, a pregnant cat. The movie is beautiful but has no pacing at all.