Becoming one of the latest actors to jump into the director’s chair, James McAvoy takes on a semi-true tale of music business bravado and bluster in California Schemin’. The title card sets the tone, cheekily saying its source material is a “true lie”. California Schemin’ follows two budding rappers, Gavin …
Welcome back to 1980s Rutshire where a small community of upper-class folk spend their lives sleeping with people who are not their wives, trying to steal the jobs of their romantic rivals and generally tear each other down. Based on characters created by the late Jilly Cooper, the gang are …
It’s fascinating to see how many cultures in all different parts of the world come to the same conclusion for all their different problems: it’s a woman to blame. The first movie from Chad to ever play the Berlinale, Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars is a fascinating picture of …
Life rarely works out the way you want, whether or not you get what you want. The Christophers uses the art of painting as its metaphor for how people come to terms with what life has given them, and also what they do about it. It’s set entirely within London’s …
First we must congratulate Laura Caselli, the casting director for Two Pianos, for realising the male movie star currently working in France whose vibe best matches Charlotte Rampling’s is François Civil. He has a tendency to play hotheaded romantic heroes and recently carried the two-part adaption of The Three Musketeers …
The first The Devil Wears Prada, based on a novel published in 2003, was released in 2006. It was the usual coming of age story in what remains a very unusual context for women: the world of work. An aspiring journalist named Andy (Anne Hathaway) became the second assistant to …
If you thought that David Mackenzie’s previous film, Relay, was stupid, you haven’t seen anything yet. In his latest disaster, Fuze, Mackenzie, and screenwriter Ben Hopkins somehow screw up a tried-and-true pressure-cooker that should elicit strong popcorn thrills and not total bewilderment. However, instead of sticking to the film’s original …
The greatest thing about film festivals is the room they provide for experimental work from anywhere in the world to catch a wider audience. The complex set-up of Dao is significantly tougher to explain than it is to watch, but it’s exceptional at capturing a large and complex family’s life …
Films based on true stories are always a difficult prospect for audiences. While most cases are effective portrayals of real events, other “true stories” can be more fabrications. Movies like I Swear operate somewhere in the middle. I Swear follows John Davidson (BAFTA winner, Robert Aramayo), a child diagnosed with …
There’s a myth that knowing your death approaches brings out the best in you. In these circumstances you will simply rise above the horror of your looming demise to love your family, be kind to your neighbours, save kittens from trees and generally be all excellent until you perish. Anyone …
Not since 2012’s Oscar-nominated Belgian bluegrass film The Broken Circle Breakdown has a European movie been so in love with Americana. There is a significant though dwindling group of Europeans for whom the American dream has always been the ideal fantasy. For these people the most definite way to express …
When the world is a smorgasbord of tastes and sensations you can’t blame someone for wanting to sample it all, but at a certain point you’ve got to admit you know what you prefer. The gimmick of the novel Allegro Pastell is a very good one: it’s the text and …
The central couple at the heart of this complex Pakistani movie have known each other from around the village since childhood. They are thrown together because everyone else considers them damaged goods. The way they deal with their damage, separately and together, enables an unusual depiction of the power struggles …
When discussing American Independent Cinema from the 1980s and 1990s, Hal Hartley’s name is a central one for the conversation. Releasing his low-budget NYC-shot film The Unbelievable Truth in 1989, the New York director launched his arguably most well-known works in the following years with Trust, Simple Men, and Flirt. …
After the movie is over but before the credits there is some explanatory text that makes Sukkwan Island aka My Father’s Island very difficult to review. For one thing, discussing them spoils the entire concept of the film. For another, it blurs the line between fiction and real life in …
If you can spot the telltale signs, there’s no second-guessing that Filipino director P. R. Monencillo Patindol’s debut feature I Grew an Inch When My Father Died, now screening at Rotterdam under Bright Future, is in part a spiritual sequel to his previous shorts Hilom (Still) and Abogbaybay (Shoredust), both …
The main value of A Second Life is that parts of it were shot on the street in Paris on the day of the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. This is therefore a movie that will be revisited fifty years from now as an important document of that moment. The rest …
Effi (Leisa Gwenllian) is a person and Blaenau Ffestiniog is the name of the village where she lives. In Welsh – everyone’s first language in this wonderful little film – the title therefore means “Effi from Blaenau.” (It’s pronounced Blay-nah.) It is an adaption of a one-woman play by Gary …
It’s been a while since such a well-mounted cast failed to meet the moment in an ensemble comedy quite like Jonah Hill’s Outcome, the actor’s sophomore outing into fiction filmmaking after his breakout directorial debut, Mid90s. That movie was (very) well received. This one will get the polar opposite reaction. …
Who’d be young? With your whole life ahead of you and no sense of who you’re truly are, you live in anticipation of a brilliant future that will obviously come to pass somehow. On the other hand, who’d be old? Either you had your chance and it didn’t work out, …