Like my browser history, Benedetta is full of lesbian nuns. I know I’ve been down on the recent spate of lesbian period dramas, saying they were anemic and lacked fire. Well this one’s French, so it’s fun and sexy and silly and melodramatic. It’s great! Just total nonsense, like you want. Stow your moping, stow…
Riders of Justice is a comedy about grief, and living in a universe devoid of meaning. Plus also a revenge action flick. Mads Mikkelsen heads an amazing cast including previous Men and Chicken castmates Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Nicolas Bro, Lars Brygmann from Good Favour and Across The Water, and Roland Moller from Land of…
Out Stealing Horses is just beautiful. Stellan Scarsgard plays an old man remembering a summer of his youth, where he developed a crush on his father’s mistress, as her family imploded. It’s a coming-of-age story, but through the melancholy gaze of age. The whole tone is of an old man’s whispers into the black night.…
Is Loro a biopic or a satire? The trouble is Silvio Berlusconi is such a mad, revolting bastard that it’s hard to tell what elements are fictionalised and what are just the truth presented so grotesquely that it seems unbelievable. The film follows Berlusconi pouting after he goes into opposition in the late 2000s and…
A film which starts out a Kafkaesque drama about an early coloniser of South America trying to get sent back home to Spain, and then descends into the Heart of Darkness, searching for a mythical Kurtz figure called Vicuna Porto. The sound and visuals in this film are great, really giving off a sweat and…
A film about the dangers of being a woman in Ireland dressed up as a grannyfapper romance. Pretty much every horrific crime committed by the Catholic Church gets played out in this movie, in which a young Irish rose gets Count Frollo’ed. Gie it a by and watch something cheery.
A film about a Finnish restaurant owner and a Syrian refugee he helps. It has this visual humour that’s sorta like something from the silent era, really old school style of comedy. I was kinda thrown by the pacing of it though, the two main characters don’t even meet for the first hour of the…
Still shaking and crying from Paradise. Had to go wash my face. It’s the story of a Russian princess who is sent to the concentration camps for hiding Jewish children from the Nazis. It’s about how she manages to keep her strength of spirit throughout her ordeal, and the impact that has on the lives…
A biopic of the poet Pablo Neruda’s pursuit and persecution by the Chilean fash. It was quite lighthearted.
A visual hymn to creation. Like almost everything at the festival I’ve seen so far, it was beautiful, slow and weird.