GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • No Date, No Signature

    An Iranian film about a doctor who becomes obsessed with idea that he might be responsible for the death of a boy after they are in a minor car accident together. This despite the fact that the boy is found to have died of botulism from eating tainted meat and didn’t die until days after the accident. This despite the fact the accident was relatively minor, and not the doctor’s fault in the first place. But psychologically it rings true, because it is about the doctor’s guilt at not having declared the accident at the time of the autopsy, and feeling like he got away with something due to his silence. A good film.

  • Super November

    The worst kind of Yes voter masturbatory persecution fantasy. Three friends sleepwalk into a dystopian future, unable to see the oncoming political threat over their attention-consuming everyday lives. Despite the heavy-handed nature of the story and having all the marks of a first film, it does achieve a warmth and sympathy for the characters and a naturalistic style for much of the drama. 

  • A Gentle Creature

    An unrelentingly grim Russian film, that culminates in a weird dream sequence that you hope is shielding you from the awful thing that is actually happening to the main character, but no, it cuts back in time for you to see her vicious and explicit gang-rape in a ghastly, seemingly never-ending final scene.

  • Sixty Minutes To Midnight

    Basically Running Man in a house. Utterly dull, nothing to say about it, just RAT-A-TAT! BOOM! roll credits.

  • Tigers Are Not Afraid

    A beautiful film about street children running from gangs in Mexico, and escaping into the world of their imagination and the unnoticed magic of the real world. Shades of Pan’s Labyrinth but also The Secret Garden, but set in a reality that’s utterly brutal.

  • Secret Santa

    A fun darkly comic seasonal splatstick.

  • Friendly Beast

    A film about a restaurant owner who snaps during a robbery and decides to kill his assailants, customers and staff. Doesn’t make sense in terms of either character or plot. Gash.

  • Pyewacket

    A film about an obnoxious, spoilt teenager dabbling in black magic to resolve her mummy issues and getting her comeuppance. Despite some honking teen dialogue, movie remained watchable in large part, if a little over-stretched.

  • The Devil and the Blacksmith

    Something of a children’s fable or a folk story. It’s beautiful and the costuming in it is great, evoking stuff like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. With writhing demons and lost children, it hits somewhere between Legend and Pan’s Labyrinth. Great movement work from the demons too.

  • Cold Skin

    A film about a lighthouse and its occupants under seige from fish-people on a remote island. It’s kind like the anti-Shape of Water, because instead of a woman falling in love and saving a fish-man, a guy kidnaps, rapes and beats a fish-woman. This sparks off the conflict, which is represented as a microcosm of the cruelty and futility of war. However this film is barely more than the idea of the premise. The lighthouse being attacked in a neverending seige by those similar but different might be a good image but an image warrants a painting, not a 2 hour film. The entire run time is essentially just that image repeated over and over again, and no amount of narration or recitation of William Blake poetry can disguise the utter absence of a story in this film. The shots are very pretty but, again, unable to compensate for more than the first few minutes of screen time, certainly unable to carry an empty shell of a film.