While at times vacuous, this Cronenberg picture is still intellectually stimulating, and most certainly one for the arthouse crowd.
Continue reading →
While at times vacuous, this Cronenberg picture is still intellectually stimulating, and most certainly one for the arthouse crowd.
Hausner’s bleak feature debut can be difficult to watch, adopting lo-fi aesthetics and conspicuously fast zoom-ins, as an outcast teenage girl tries to cope with the problems of family and school by seducing an older man and a younger boy.
This could be Seidl’s most provocative work about the moral slippage of religious fanatics, as the faith of an extremely devoted Catholic Austrian woman is tested by the unexpected return of her handicapped Muslim husband.
This tense German drama about a theft incident in a school perceptively reflects the state of the world today in a classroom, backed by an excellent lead performance by Leonie Benesch.
An Austrian woman goes to Kenya in search of intimacy and connection as Seidl, in his usual provocative mode, explores ‘sex tourism’ as both a curse and an antidote to sheer human loneliness.
A sweeping if unremarkable, ‘globe-trotting’ drama about a father who tries to locate his daughters after surviving the Armenian genocide of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, with Faith Akin’s approach too conventional to really compel.
Akin goes terribly off-course with this vile and nihilistic serial killer movie, based on a true story, yet with nothing valuable to say.
A young woman’s unwavering stand against the shameful Iranian legal system is captured with both intimacy and exasperation in this insightful documentary about the case of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was hanged for acting in self-defence against a rapist in 2014.
Petzold’s Berlinale Grand Jury Prize winner, about a group of friends and strangers at a holiday house as a forest fire blazes many miles away, is a strong, terrifically scripted and effortless portrayal of human relationships under scrutiny and pretence.
It’s difficult to have an opinion on Schanelec’s new film, which is decidedly inscrutable though it retains the German slow cinema auteur’s unique sensibilities as it explores themes of fate, guilt and grief in an elusive way.