Category: GFF strand – CineMasters

An achingly beautiful film about grief, and rekindling life and love from loss.

Just out of seeing Soul on a String. Fuck knows. Beautiful though.

You know when you watch something and all you can think is, “What the fuck?!” Just out of Men and Chicken, a truly bizarre comedy about a group of ludicrous degenerate brothers. Mads Mikkelson is utterly unrecognisable as a gross, imbecilic compulsive masturbater. Sørren Malling is equally mad as he disciplines his brothers with slaps round the chops with a stuffed owl. Described in style as “if Franz Kafka had written The Three Stooges” and that is spot on. Deeply weird.

A surreal comedy in which Catherine Deneuve pumps a gorilla. Our realm of existence is essentially a game of Sims God plays in his trackies while halfcut because he’s giant cruel deadbeat. Luckily his goth daughter is gonna come to Earth and fuck up his shit. Easy to compare in style to Amelie, but actually much weirder. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Chinese family saga melodrama that starts with a Pet Shop Boys hoedown.

I really enjoyed it. A biopic of the work of social scientist Stanley Milgram. Because it was thematically focused on conformity, perception, shared belief and shared suspension of disbelief, it was played as open theatre, with Peter Sarsgaard directly addressing the camera and some scenes performed in front of still blank-and-white photograph back-drops. 

Reminded me of the way American Splendor was shot.

A Memento-esque crime caper that oscillates oddly between comedy and tragedy. Christopher Plummer plays an elderly dementia sufferer who hunts down the former Auschwitz guard he believes is responsible for the death of his family.

A movie about a refugee family-of-circumstance swapping a life of violence in Sri Lanka for a life of violence in the French slums. Despite the subject, it had a surprising amount of warmth and humour.

Watching it in a theatre resounding with sighs and sniffs. By the end I was just sobbing into my hands and had to go wash my face in the sink just make a decent showing of myself. It’s about a family divided during the Cultural Revolution in China, trying to heal in the aftermath. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t mess around, you want to greet in the first 10 minutes, if you’re like me you’ll be greeting by the end of the first half hour, and you’ll just greet continuously for the remainder of the two hours. DO NOT let the chance to see this go by you.