Festival Reviews

Arcadia

Arcadia

by | Feb 18, 2024 | ,

The living haunt the dead in Yorgos Zois’s sexy glumfest ‘Arcadia’, an aching, downbeat tale about loss and lingering grief, told from the ghosts’ POV.

Maria’s Silence

Maria’s Silence

by | Feb 18, 2024 | , ,

The true story of Latvian-born German silent film diva Maria Leiko and her fateful journey to Stalin’s USSR in 1937 is retold in Davis Simanis’s ‘Maria’s Silence’ with a tragic depth that is engrossing and emotional.

Dahomey

Dahomey

by | Feb 18, 2024 | , ,

Mati Diop’s thought-provokingly cerebral-poetic documentary follows the return of 26 looted cultural artefacts and their welcome home to Benin, encompassing the celebrations as well as larger debates around colonialization and how to reintegrate such potently spiritual objects into a society 130 years after they were plundered.

Suspended Time

Suspended Time

by | Feb 17, 2024 | , ,

Olivier Assayas’s semi-autobiographical reverie ‘Suspended Time’ on his stay in the family home during lockdown, is likely his weakest work, playing like a parody of an intellectualized director’s banal ruminations.

No Other Land

No Other Land

by | Feb 17, 2024 | , ,

Beginning in 2019, a quartet of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers in the Occupied Territories start documenting Israel’s appropriation of the land and its escalation until just after the start of the current juggernaut in Gaza.

La cocina

La cocina

by | Feb 16, 2024 | , ,

A disappointing, maddeningly self-indulgent plunge into the tensions and inequities in the kitchen of a Times Square eatery, designed as an anti-capitalist diatribe messily juggling personal and choral storytelling but saved to some degree by excellent chiaroscuro camerawork and a strong cast.

The Editorial Office

The Editorial Office

by | Feb 16, 2024 | ,

In the week between the Grammys and the Super Bowl, Human Rights Watch announced that Vladimir Putin and other military officials should be investigated for war crimes following Russia’s assault on Mariupol. On Valentine’s Day it was reported that UNESCO calculated...

Every You Every Me

Every You Every Me

by | Feb 16, 2024 | ,

Michael Fetter Nathansky, with assistance from lead actress Aenne Schwarz, inspects a shaky relationship in the shadow of work pressures in this adequately sensitive, surreal, and discomfiting look at marriage and its dissatisfactions.

Crossing

Crossing

by | Feb 16, 2024 | ,

Jennie Livingston’s seminal Paris is Burning was probably the first hit film to show what LGBTQ+ people have always known: we make our own families. They’re often not biological but they are carefully chosen, proving that genetics is no determinant of unconditional...

Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These

by | Feb 15, 2024 | ,

Cillian Murphy follows his huge ‘Oppenheimer’ success with glum but powerful personal project ‘Small Things Like These’, a soulful literary psychodrama about mercy, empathy, complicity and dark misdeeds in 1980s Ireland.

Black Tea

Black Tea

by | Feb 22, 2024 | , ,

The gap between African and Chinese culture proves easier to breach than the perspectives that separate a woman and a man in acclaimed director Abderrahmane Sissako’s ‘Black Tea’, a fascinating love story set in China but one that sadly gets lost in the telling.

Cu Li Never Cries

Cu Li Never Cries

by | Feb 21, 2024 | ,

Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature, ‘Cu Li Never Cries’, is an absorbing, beautiful ode about a pensioner’s nostalgia for her past and a young couple’s uncertainty about their future.

Rising Up at Night

Rising Up at Night

by | Feb 21, 2024 | ,

Nelson Makengo’s beautifully shot and observed documentary ‘Rising Up at Night’ captures the darkness of Kinshasa after severe flooding and electricity cuts, along with the resilience of its people.

Intercepted

Intercepted

by | Feb 21, 2024 | , ,

Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych’s quietly powerful documentary ‘Intercepted’ combines bleakly beautiful, defiantly hopeful images of her war-ravaged homeland with recordings of phone calls made by invading Russian soldiers.

Awards Corner

Berlinale 2024

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