THE GIANTS Two brothers in their mid-teens are dropped off at their grandfather’s deserted house in the country and left to fend for themselves for the summer. Boredom is overtaken by more excitement than they bargained for after they fall in with a slightly older local boy. Filmed with a lushness that will have you longing for the European summer, this funny, perceptive picture of unfettered adolescence venturing into peril imbues Stand by Me with sardonic social realism and shades of the Brothers Grimm. — BG
“Bouli Lanners’ third feature deftly negotiates between heartbreak and hilarity in a picaresque story notable for its boisterous good spirits, economical storytelling and engaging central performances… The lightness of touch that Lanners displays with casting and story allows him to confront some serious issues… The performances of the three boys are very impressive; unselfconscious, endearing and completely believable.” — Allan Hunter, Screendaily ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN The all-time biggest hit at the Brazilian box office, José Padilha’s blazing Elite Squad sequel is even more riveting than the original (NZIFF08), and much more incisive and damning in its exposure of twisted alliances of power, police and crime at work in Rio.
“Unlike many sequels, it is completely self-contained, so if you don’t remember a thing about the first movie, that won’t interfere with your enjoyment of this one. From the brilliantly staged opening sequence – a prison riot that turns into a bloodbath – the energy never lets up. The main character, Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the leader of Rio de Janeiro’s special military police unit, mismanages the prison riot, so he is removed from his job but eventually kicked upstairs to a government intelligence post. There he uncovers a web of corruption that spreads from the police department to the highest levels of government. Although the film is billed as fiction, it draws on real scandals in Brazil, which may explain why it has connected so powerfully with audiences at home… While Nascimento can kick butt with the sangfroid of Dirty Harry, the actor also conveys genuine anguish when surveying the tragic consequences of the violence ravaging Rio… Nascimento’s relationship with his teenage son adds unexpected tenderness.” — Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter
“Beautifully documented by Brazil’s young, but revered, cinematographer Lula Carvalho and complemented by an equally strong soundtrack… An exhilarating and at times tear-jerking ride through the city’s prisons, slums, hospitals and parliament that cuts dangerously close to the bone.” — Tom Phillips, Screendaily INCENDIES The scope and the sheer dramatic punch of Incendies are virtually guaranteed to make it one of this year’s ‘arthouse’ must-sees. The Festival brings you the chance to experience its power on the truly giant screen.
“A staggering political drama that could put you in mind of the intimate sweep of Bernardo Bertolucci, Incendies feels like a mighty movie in our midst. The film seems sprung from a different era – the gloriously bold early 70s – or perhaps an alien studio system. (That would beCanada’s.) The dislocation fits the material perfectly: Denis Villeneuve’s family drama, based on a much chattier play by Wajdi Mouawad, takes place in a fictional Middle East country a lot likeLebanon, where atrocities linger in memory…
This is a land largely unknown to Arabborn Montreal siblings Jeanne and Simon, who assemble in the offices of their mother’s notary for the reading of her will. They learn of a father they never knew, as well as a brother, and are tasked with finding them both. The scene sounds like a cliché (and is), yet as the movie begins to toggle between the pair’s explorations in the former war zone and flashbacks to the violent life of their mother, Nawal (the restrained Lubna Azabal), you forgive the setup. In Villeneuve’s hands, we’re delivered to revelatory terror: A fierce honor killing is eclipsed by a masterfully mounted siege on a Muslim bus by Christian soldiers. Quieter moments of personal reckoning carry explosive weight – to reveal more is to strip the film of its sad wisdom. The country may not exist, but the tale’s truth is everywhere.” — Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out LET THE BULLETS FLY “Machiavellian mind games, a twisted vendetta and high-octane gun slinging among a bandit posing as a governor, his strategist, and a small-town kingpin are the stuff of adventure and trenchant humor in Let the Bullets Fly. As an allegory on power, corruption and rough justice, it has flashes of intelligence and political acumen. Actor-auteur Jiang Wen directs with a macho, devil-may-care bravado that expresses the anarchy and rapacious opportunism of warlord-dominated China in the 1920s. Although the promotional hook is the rare cast combination of Chow Yun Fat, Ge You and Jiang himself, its instant rise to the summit of China’s box office may be attributed more to the racy storytelling and current Chinese fascination with Wild West crime capers… Although strategic wars are not novel to China’s period blockbusters, few achieve this film’s level of sophistication in nuanced dialogue, plot twists and bravura acting.” — Maggie Lee, Hollywood Reporter WINTER VACATION ‘Like South Park in slow motion’ quipped writer Mark Peranson, Li Hongqi’s mercilessly deadpan comedy charts the endless boredom of the last day of winter School holidays in a depopulated industrial settlement in remote Inner Mongolia – and the even more profound absurdity of the first day back in class. — BG
“Li Hongqi has slowly been perfecting his style of drop-deadpan humour with philosophical underpinnings: a kind of minimalist sitcom-Kafka, Kaurismaki-cum-Jarmusch blend that is as mesmerizing as it is hilarious. With Winter Vacation, he hits the bullseye. The mix of slacker teens and semicomatose adults is perfect; with precociously world-weary little children thrown into the mix… The ‘action’… is punctuated by offbeat chants and a song by China’s most radical independent musician, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Did we mention that the film was, also, oddly, unnervingly beautiful?” — Shelly Kraicer, Vancouver International Film Festival
“No other director can touch poet-novelist Li Hongqi when it comes to deadpan studies of the raging emptiness of life in modern China… [Winter Vacation] shows nothing the Film Bureau could object to, but effortlessly demolishes every post-Olympics platitude about China’s ‘growth’ and quality of life. Shot in Inner Mongolia but set in some dark recess of the mind, it offers social realism as a protracted hallucination, underscored by avant-garde noises from Zuoxiao Zuzhou and The Top Floor Circus. Li says that he prefers audiences to laugh inwardly rather than out loud, but few will be able to restrain themselves in the face of some of these one-liners.” — Tony Rayns, London Film Festival THE ROUND UP On 19 July 1942, 13,000 French Jews were rounded up by their own country’s police and locked inside a Paris velodrome – en route to Nazi concentration camps. Seventy years later, French admission of such instrumental collaboration in the Holocaust has become a queasy cultural phenomenon (already familiar to anyone who has seen Sarah’s Key). Rose Bosch’s elaborately staged The Round Up directly confronts the known events, dramatising scenes of official connivance alongside the unfolding experience of the baffled victims. Adhering closely to meticulous research, Bosch nevertheless tries to alleviate terror with emotional drama, and to sweeten the indigestible by including in her account one of the few who escaped. But genocide won’t be tamed. Promoted on state-run television and studied in schools, The Round Up is a moving, painfully awkward and significantly belated acknowledgment of what can never ever be adequately admitted. — BG POINT BLANK Cutting a swathe through a maze of Paris streets and subways, Point Blank is an exhilarating throwback to an era in pulp action when you could see, from one shot to the next, what the hell was going on. Beginning with a night-time pursuit that crashes into an expertly staged accident, it bolts along at breakneck speed, terse and taut enough to hold the tension level at red alert. Samuel (virile Gilles Lellouche) is a nurse whose very pregnant Spanish wife, Nadia (radiant Elena Anaya), is confined to bedrest. She and the unborn are destined (obviously) to be in grave danger, and their peril begins the moment Samuel is charged with the care of the desperate gunman wounded in the opening chase. The man of peace becomes the man of action, figuring out as he careens around Paris which side of the law he’s up against. If he’d seen the same thrillers as everyone else he’d already know: nuance isn’t this movie’s claim to fame, but it sure as heck knows how to move. — BG NOTHING TO DECLARE Dany Boon follows up his phenomenally popular Welcome to the Sticks. Proceeding from his observation that racism appears especially stupid when the antagonists look alike and speak (more or less) the same language, he forges farce from the age-old stand-off between salt-of-the-earth Belgians and their supercilious neighbours in the large republic to the south-west. It’s 1992 and small-town Belgian customs officer Ruben (Benoît Poelvoorde) is melting down at the prospect of the Common Market dissolving the border. No longer will he be paid to insult any escargot-muncher rash enough to venture into his Kingdom. Even worse, he’s about to be teamed up with his French equivalent (Boon) in an EU drug squad. Need it be added that the wily Frenchman has a yen for Ruben’s lovely young sister? Broad, energetic and zestily performed, Boon’s comedy kids beleaguered nationalist sensibilities either side of the border. It is a hit in both countries too. — BG THE SCREEN ILLUSION Mathieu Amalric, versatile auteur-actor and director, spirits Corneille’s canonic 17th-century French theatre classic, L’Illusion comique, to contemporary realms in this inventive cinema treat set in the luxurious Hôtel de Louvre. From his lair in the hotel basement, Alcandre, a wizard in the original play, here ingeniously transformed into the hotel’s concierge, can observe on CCTV the many comings and goings, from past, present and even future, in the establishment. Pridamant, concerned about his wayward son, Clindor, seeks Alcandre’s help and soon discovers that Clindor is PA to Matamore, a grandly delusional computer game creator. Both men are involved with Isabelle, who has been promised by her father to another… Farcical and dramatic complications ensue. The wonderful Comédie Française actors converse in the play’s sublime alexandrine couplets – artfully subtitled – as naturally as though requesting a baguette. — SR ROMANTICS ANONYMOUS Chocolate-making brings two sensitive, anxiety-ridden people together in this delicious retro romantic comedy starring Benoît Poelvoorde (Coco avant Chanel) and Isabelle Carré. ‘I have no problem with women,’ chocolatier Jean-René assures his therapist. ‘They just terrify me, that’s all.’ He masks his affliction by giving abrupt orders to his chocolate factory staff and hiding in his office. When Angelique, also acutely timid, drums up the courage to apply for a job at the factory, she’s under the mistaken impression she’ll be doing what she does best: making chocolates. Her role is in fact to market the wares and boost declining sales, an excruciating task for a person who faints when praised and has developed peculiar strategies to mask her praiseworthy talents. Watching this perfectly matched, tongue-tied twosome trying to overcome miscommunication through diligent effort – and succeeding through a shared passion for chocolate – is a sweet treat. — SR
“A modest, but absolutely delicious, confection packed with bittersweet humour and genuine charm… This sprightly tale of two abnormally shy individuals… neither of whom realises the other also suffers from the constant tension of heightened emotional sensitivity – deserves to get out and see the world… Unlike some other, better-known conditions and addictions hyper-emotionalism may be easier to mask. Ironically, sufferers are often mistaken for being self-assured when it’s more likely they’re dying a thousand deaths. Director and co-writer Améris, himself afflicted with the condition, turns clinical shyness into a source of gentle, consistently touching comedy.” — Lisa Nesselsen, Screendaily THE WOMEN ON THE 6TH FLOOR Sometimes released as Service Entrance, this breezy upstairs/downstairs comedy has been a hit both at home and abroad. It’s 1962. An uptight middle-class couple – Fabrice Luchini and Sandrine Kiberlain – are barely aware that the servants’ quarters on an upper floor of their Paris apartment building are overflowing with refugees from Franco’s Spain: the sisters and aunts and mothers and cousins of the legal occupant (Carmen Maura). After they hire one of them, the beautiful, mysterious, quietly challenging Maria, to be their housemaid, they are gradually made aware of their own unintentional insensitivity and are drawn out of their tired routines. Kiberlain’s touching remoteness from the infectious gusto of the tenants brings a little edge to the film’s comic fantasy, while Luchini has a ball as the stuffy fusspot rescued from himself by the chance to play godfather to a houseful of hot-blooded Spanish country girls. — BG
“A delight, thanks to a witty script and the presence of French national treasure, Fabrice Luchini, whose comic schtick evokes Molière. Luchini plays a tight-assed stockbroker who browbeats servants over the timing of his morning boiled egg… Le Guay and his charming cast work it to perfection .” – Erica Abeel, indieWIRE
“A three word review: it is charming… From the opening ‘interviews’ with Spanish maids, where one dismisses French food and admits a distaste for cleaning silverware…the film is alternately poignant and fluffy… Spain comes to personify the exotic with such wonderful hilarity that even the romance-trumps-all endin gcannot disappoint. It is incredibly difficult for this critic to write anything remotely critical when, more than anything else, The Women on the 6th Floor calls forth a smile. You have to see this film.” – Leslie-Stonebraker, NY Press A SEPARATION A secular middle-class family is accused of a crime by an impoverished religious one in a gripping thriller that provides a layered and exceptionally revealing picture of life in Iran. Compelling proof, when we least expected it, that it is still possible for Iranian filmmakers to make films dramatising conflicts that resonate both within and outside the Islamic Republic, A Separation was the hands-down winner at this year’s Berlin Festival. Ironically, the jury awarding the film the top prize (and retooling the principal acting awards to become prizes for the acting ensemble) was supposed to be headed by the political prisoner, Iranian director Jafar Panahi. — BG
“Showing a control of investigative pacing that recalls classic Hitchcock and a feel for ethical nuance that is all his own, Farhadi has hit upon a story that is not only about men and women, children and parents, justice and religion in today’s Iran, but that raises complex and globally relevant questions of responsibility, of the subjectivity and contingency of ‘telling the truth’, and of how thin the line can be between inflexibility and pride – especially of the male variety – and selfishness and tyranny…
As the film builds to its dramatic climax, we wonder how the director can possibly find an ending that does justice to this compelling story’s narrative and thematic complexities. The round of applause that followed the film’s Berlinale screening was a tribute, at least in part, to the sensitivity – and perhaps, the inevitability – of the perfect solution he comes up with.” — Lee Marshall, Screendaily METROPOLIS The latest, and surely the most complete, resurrection we’ll ever see of Fritz Lang’s colossal 1927 futuristic thriller follows the discovery in Buenos Aires in 2008 of a worn 16mm print, including some 25 minutes thought lost since distributors wielded the axe soon after the film’s premiere. This footage has now been cut into the superb 2002 restoration (which covered many of the absent scenes with explanatory title cards), combined with a new recording of the original 1927 orchestral score and transferred to HD for distribution to 21st-century cinemas. (The NZSO will present the film in November with a live performance of the same score.) — BG
“This season’s most satisfying sci-fi blockbuster is a crypto-Marxist, proto-Fascist spectacle first released 80 years ago: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the legendary art deco futuro-fable of industrialist excess, proletarian rebellion, and robot romance, one of the last big-budget exhilarations of the pre-talkie era. Once considered merely hokey and excessive, Lang’s hyper-capitalist vision of workers oppressed by mechanical Molochs as their labor sustains a paradise for wealthy technocrats now seems both quaintly steampunk and disjunctively contemporary… Lang’s impossibly vast skyscraper-ziggurats… are the blueprint for nearly every science-fiction movie city of the past 30 years… Mixing European avant-garde techniques with Hollywood mass-cult extravagance, Metropolis’s staggering architectural scale and syncopated near-musical choreography still seem surprisingly contemporary in an age that has far from tired of seeing the future in harshly dystopic terms.” — Ed Halter, Village Voice SLEEPING SICKNESS “Sleeping Sickness is a marvel, springing off Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with its perceptive slowburn of a story about a German doctor (the splendid Pierre Bokma) stuck in Cameroon for reasons he can’t wholly explain. It’s structurally bold, making an unannounced forward leap of three years in the middle, and switching focus to the Marlow role of a young, black Parisian colleague (Jean-Christophe Folly, funny and bewildered), who’s posted to check on him… I think it’s the best thing here [in Berlin], both for confidently diagnosing the rotten state of international development in Africa, and giving us rich characters who retain a bit of mystery.” — Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph
“Ulrich Köhler’s striking film, which won Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival, roams through the incongruous terrain of contemporary Africa like a restless insomniac with eyes wide open.” — Clare Stewart, Sydney Film Festival LA DOLCE VITA Fellini fans, rejoice. Quite possibly the world’s best known ‘foreign-language’ film, his 1960 La dolce vita is the latest beneficiary of Gucci and The Film Foundation’s film restoration programme. Both ageless and utterly of its time in condemning the modern decadence it so stylishly flaunts, the film that coined the term paparazzo stars Marcello Mastroianni as jaded Marcello, a journalist pursuing the good life in Rome at the dawn of the 60s. Condemned by the Vatican, the film was an international succès de scandale.
The film’s iconic images – the statue of Christ being flown over Rome, Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain – are instantly recognisable symbols of Italian society in glamorous dissolution. Nino Rota’s score is just as indelible. Otello Martelli’s sparkling black-and-white widescreen cinematography has never looked better than in this stunning restoration. — BG
“After La dolce vita, Fellini was suddenly more than just a director. He was a maestro. His vision was extravagant, almost unprecedented. Like many filmmakers of that era, Fellini was trying to create a genuinely modern cinema… He transformed Marcello’s journey through this glittering, empty world into a spiritual epic, a sprawling, episodic tapestry of Roman cosmopolitan life with all its excesses.” — Martin Scorsese
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with The Film Foundation, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale, Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Mediaset – Medusa, Paramount Pictures and Cinecittà Luce. Restoration funding provided by GU CCI and The Film Foundation. FOOTNOTE A deadpan Israeli comedy about duelling father-son professors, Footnote was an unexpected hit at Cannes and took away the Best Screenplay award for its quick-witted and richly detailed script.
“Father-son movies are usually man-boy dramas, but this excellent Israeli film, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, shows that the threads of competition, envy, exasperation and love are no less complex when the parent and the child are both grown men. Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba) is a professor of Talmudic studies at the HebrewUniversity, toiling tirelessly and nearly anonymously for 30 years to unlock the secrets of the Jerusalem Bible. His son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) teaches in the same department but with much more success; to Eliezer’s brilliance and dedication he adds the gift of smooth schmoozing. When one of them is awarded the vaunted Israelprize, the other must summon restraint and ethics, all the while stewing at the injustice. Rigorously balanced in its sympathies, and with a piercing view of human behavior under stress, the film is a human comedy that spans and understands the generations. This subtle delight is no mere footnote to the competition slate; it is one of this Festival’s glories.” — Mary Corliss, Time
“A comedy set in the Israeli academic world, and within that, in the tiny and rarefied realm of Talmudic scholarship, might sound like the ultimate film-festival niche product… But Cedar’s film is a story about intense professional rivalry and father-son conflict, and you don’t have to be Jewish or work in a university to understand that.” — Andrew O’Hehir, salon.com LE QUATTRO VOLTE A rugged valley in Italy’s mountainous region of Calabria is the setting for this wonderful film, a spellbinding take on a way of life as old as the elements. Michelangelo Frammartino’s ode to the cycles of nature applies a wryly detached ‘documentary’ eye to what is in fact a meticulously staged and richly loaded drama – in which some of the principal actors are mineral, vegetable and animal. Here humanity is no longer at the centre of the universe, simply part of its mysterious process: we see a mighty tree accorded more ceremony in death than a superstitious old man. Frammartino’s eye on the animal world is little short of miraculous. He holds us enthralled by the territorial contests of baby goats – and, in a shot that will live forever in cinema history, floors us with the intervention in human affairs of a dog. This mutt’s seamless execution of an elaborately choreographed gag makes up for the lack of a Buster Keaton comedy on this year’s programme. — BG
“Le quattro volte, an idiosyncratic and amazing new film… is so full of surprises – nearly every shot contains a revelation, sneaky or overt, cosmic or mundane – that even to describe it is to risk giving something away… In four chapters… Mr Frammartino successively chronicles the earthly transit and material transmutation of an old man, a young goat, a tree and a batch of charcoal. Each being or thing is examined with such care and wit that you become engrossed in the moment-to-moment flow of cinematic prose, only at the end grasping the epic scope and lyrical depth of what you have seen, which is more or less all of creation.” — A.O. Scott, NY Times THE SALT OF LIFE Gianni Di Gregorio, who made an exceptionally charming directorial debut at 59 with Mid-August Lunch (NZIFF09), returns with a more expansive but equally beguiling second feature. Once again he plays a protagonist named Gianni and once again he’s being given the runaround by an aged mother played by nonagenarian Valeria De Franciscis Bendoni. She’s not so disingenuous in her manipulations this time round; she’s simply imperious, a magnificent old wastrel spending his inheritance on house parties, crate-loads of Krug and lavish gifts for the household help.
The Salt of Life’s Gianni has escaped mamma’s domain for long enough to have taken on a wife, who now regards him with affectionate disdain, and fathered a daughter (played by Di Gregorio’s own daughter, Teresa) whose blithe indifference to a devoted boyfriend is the latest in a long line of slights to the male gender. Gianni pines for a time when women returned his gaze and didn’t just see him as an obliging chap with time on his hands who might run errands. He feels the urge to break out, to beguile the lovely young things he sees everywhere… or, failing that, maybe look up some of those old girlfriends scared off long ago by mamma. A wistful, funny ode to female power and a wry apologia for hopeless male fantasy, The Salt of Life provides an effervescent, Old-World antidote to the current Italian Prime Minister’s views of women’s place in the nation’s life. — BG
“Di Gregorio navigates his film with such a sense of delicacy that its tone is never coarsened… [his] film manages to be as charming as Mid-August Lunch; a tremendous achievement.” — Andrew Pulver, The Guardian THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS A best-selling novel about two bright, fiercely lonely misfits caught in a strange life-long pas de deux is now a strange, fiercely unconventional and ecstatically cinematic film. Alice, a photographer, was a golden child tailored for perfection by her ambitious parents until a ski accident left her with a limp and an enduring sense of disgrace. Mattia is a mathematical prodigy, marginalised at an early age by the responsibility he’s given for his mentally challenged sister. Director Saverio Constanzo cuts back and forth through their intermittently overlapping lives from childhood into their 40s to create a dazzling mosaic of the crucial incidents, most of which occur, tellingly, around crowded, vividly orchestrated parties – a kid’s birthday, a house party, a wedding. Luca Marinelli and Alba Rohrwacher (I Am Love) astound as the adult Mattia and Alice, even taking on the radical weight changes of their tragically self-dividing characters. — BG GANTZ & GANTZ: PERFECT ANSWER Death is not necessarily the end in Sato Shinsuke’s blockbuster live-action adaptation of the incredibly bizarre cult manga and anime series Gantz. We are screening both parts of this epic sci-fi mindbender in the Festival, so unlike audiences in Japan you won’t have to wait long after the first movie’s cliffhanger to see the thrilling conclusion.
We meet childhood friends Kurono Kei (Ninomiya Kazunari, Letters from Iwo Jima) and Kato Masaru (Matsuyama Kenichi, Norwegian Wood, Death Note) moments before they meet their demise, mowed down by a rushing subway train when their attempt to save a drunk who falls on the tracks goes horribly wrong. They suddenly find themselves dazed and confused, along with several other recently ‘dead’ people, trapped in a nondescript Tokyo apartment. Nondescript, that is, apart from a mysterious black orb, known as Gantz, which has summoned them to take part in the ultimate survival game.
Outfitted with super high-tech outfits and weaponry, Kurono, Kato and the others are dispatched on a series of missions against a succession of increasingly dangerous aliens. Kurono quickly takes to his new role as an alien-hunting superhero, whereas Kato is keen to find a way to escape Gantz’s control so he can get back to the real world…
Like Death Note before it, Gantz revels in existential mystery as much as heart-stopping action. Director Sato keeps us as much in the dark as his characters with regards to Gantz’s true motives. Is this some kind of purgatorial punishment? Or some kind of malicious alien game? Answers will be revealed, and you’ll want to keep watching to find out. — MM SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO A blast from the past set in the year 2199, Space Battleship Yamato is a gleaming ¥2 billion live-action/CGI spectacular, the culmination of an internationally influential franchise that’s been generating television and animated movies in Japan since 1974. Earth is a radioactive wasteland, surrounded by fleets of humanity’s sworn enemy, the iron-plated Gamilons. The key to Earth’s resurrection may lie on Iscandar, a planet 148,000 light years away. Charismatic Kodai (actor, rock star, heartthrob Kimura Takuya) emerges from the shadows of an earlier fray to pilot the massive Yamato, a spaceship outfitted with a time-warping, wave-motion engine. Militaristic nostalgia (the actual Yamato was a massive WWII battleship), goofy corporate solemnity (dig that salute) and try-hard social relevance (lippy female officers! eco-awareness!): it all adds up to a mega-mix of old-school interplanetary thrills, tailor-made for kids from seven to 77. — BG NORWEGIAN WOOD This bold adaptation of Murakami Haruki’s popular novel of tortured first loves moves uncannily between elegant pictorial objectivity and rhapsodic passages that engulf us in romantic anguish. In the late 60s (most strongly evoked by the sharp fashion sense of the leads)Tokyouniversities are rife with political unrest, but Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is consumed by inner turmoil. He is falling in love with the fragile, painfully inhibited Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and becoming increasingly fixated on her devotion to honouring a dead boy they both loved. The morbid power of their bond is tested by his much worldlier roommate Nagasawa and the mocking flirtation of the uninhibited Midori, who clearly fancies him but won’t play second fiddle to a ghost.
‘As a maker of exquisite images, and as a poet of melancholy, Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya), is almost freakishly gifted,’ says critic Shane Danielsen, and the proof is everywhere in this film. Ravishing landscapes provide visceral expression of young hearts thrilled by the pure grandeur of emotional devastation. Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin (In the Mood for Love) and Radiohead composer Jonny Greenwood contribute crucially to Tran’s disconcerting eroticism of sorrow. Surrender to its impact while you have the chance on the giant Civic screen. — BG
“The performances of the young cast attain an affecting blend of reticence and hope, but it’s Tran’s fastidious technique that nudges the film into the realms of greatness.” — David Jenkins, Time Out THE DAY HE ARRIVES Hong Sang-soo’s latest is a characteristically sly farce of feckless men and hopeful women and nudges his usual dextrous juggling with narrative time into the twilight zone.
“One of the loveliest, lightest films at Cannes this year, pensive yet often swept by quiet pleasures, was Hong Sang-soo’s delicately surreal The Day He Arrives. It is a sparser Groundhog Day done by Hong, in black and white and with copious alcohol. A young retired film director returns to Seoul and decides to meet his old friend, and before, during and after that encounter he runs into numerous other filmmakers – this surreal Seoul seems populated nearly entirely by production crew – drunkenly looks up his ex-girlfriend, and hangs around a bar whose owner looks exactly like – and indeed is played by the same actress as – his ex. And then the next day comes, and it proceeds with déjà vu echoes as the previous one, yet with different turns of each encounter.” — Daniel Kasman, mubi.com OKI’S MOVIE Festival favourite Hong Sang-soo returns with a playful, supremely droll, multi-part comedy that finds the self-reflexive auteur in inspired form. Shifting between past and present, reality and fiction, Hong divides his film into several short films that chronicle the fumbling amorous and professional entanglements of young director Jingu, his film school professor Song, and fellow student Oki. Jingu pathetically pursues Oki, who herself is secretly having an affair with Song. Oki caps this inglorious love triangle with her own movie, laying bare the ‘guilt and exhilaration’ of her affairs with both Jingu and Song. — MM
“As you’d expect from Hong Sang-soo, much soju is drunk, neurotic insecurity proliferates, and the chasm between men’s and women’s experiences opens pretty wide. Of course, it’s all done with sardonic wit, laugh-out-loud humour, wry embarrassment… and an ironic touch of Elgar.” — Tony Rayns, Vancouver International Film Festival MYSTERIES OF LISBON Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon is one of the wonders of the year, a sumptuous epic immersion in the romantic intrigues and perfidies of 19th-century Portuguese nobility, priests and pirates. The labyrinthine plot begins with a teenage orphan, who through revelations about the people around him unlocks the secret of his own patrimony. Rife with false identities, stories within stories and surreal twists of fate, the film is opulently realised in breathtaking HD, and savours narrative conventions and fatal coincidences with the sardonic wisdom of a master storyteller. — BG
“From the first strings of the swoony, old-fashioned score by veteran composer Jorge Arriagada over the opening credits, it’s clear that Ruiz wishes to envelop the viewer in lush, traditional storytelling… He has the perfect artistic temperament for the kind of epically layered filmmaking [required for] a film of Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1852 novel, a beloved Borgesian classic of Portuguese literature little known to English-language readers. His tendency toward the baroque is tempered by a literate approach to character and a stately aesthetic…
Despite all the shifting identities this is no tale of trickery or deception – rather these are the vicissitudes of life, on high and down below, and Ruiz’s film paints on a large enough canvas to capture it all, in vivid, telling detail. Though it may seem daunting, the size of the film is its chief pleasure. There’s so much room to parry and maneuver, so many doors (some literal) to unlock, secrets and coincidences to be in thrall to.” — Michael Koresky, Reverse Shot THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU This ingenious found-footage assemblage audaciously documents the Romanian dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu solely by repurposing a treasure trove of official Communist-era newsreels and propaganda. The result is a mordant fiction in which we see Ceauşescu hobnob with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, host President Nixon on a state visit to Bucharest and receive a spectacularly weird, almost psychedelic welcome to North Korea, but see nothing of the bread queues, the overflowing orphanages or the economic ruin that crippled his country. — MM
“‘Autobiography’ is the operative word. This is the story of Ceauşescu as he would have written it in moving images if he could have. Romanians, of course, will write a mirror-opposite story as they watch, and the ironies will be rich – a black enough comedy to make one weep. But even for those with only the barest knowledge of this particular history, the movie is fascinating.” — Amy Taubin, Artforum ELENA The new film from the director of The Return (NZIFF04) is a riveting family drama and a chilling portrait of social relations in capitalist Russia. At its centre is Elena, caught between her wealthy new husband’s family and her wastrel son from an earlier marriage. Elena took the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, awarded by a jury that included Emir Kusturica and Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw. — BG
“A middle-aged wife and mother is driven to desperate, decisive action in Elena, a wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian [director] Andrey Zvyagintsev in outstanding form… Fully retaining his fascination with the moral impact of individual choices within a fragile family unit, Zvyagintsev spins a taut, engrossing yarn about a coveted inheritance, cruel class differences and quietly monstrous misdeeds…
In his 2003 debut, The Return, Zvyagintsev evinced an eye for landscapes and a rich sense of biblical allegory, talents he seems to have constructively refocused after the less glowing response to 2007’s The Banishment. Long takes and pregnant silences are still very much hallmarks of his aesthetic, but here that astute visual sense has been placed firmly in service of a taut domestic drama that grips at every step…
Zvyagintsev extends his characters a compassion that bespeaks a bone-deep understanding of human unpredictability, the way people often reveal or emphasize different aspects of themselves depending on who’s listening. No one in this drama is more complex than Elena herself… realized to perfection in Markina’s beautifully nuanced performance, first among equals in a very fine cast.” — Justin Chang, Variety SILENT SOULS “A perfect example of film’s ability to take viewers into other worlds, Silent Souls is a profound and moving cinematic poem about love and loss, set against the bleak landscape of central western Russia. Mixing folk legend, ethnography, race memory and road-movie narrative, this ravishingly-shot story of a dead wife and the two significant men from her life who travel to the river shore where they will cremate her, detaches the places and people we meet from the here and now and pushes them into a suspended netherworld… One of the charming, surprising things about the film is that its elegiac, dreamlike tone is never upset by obvious scriptwriting temptations, even while scraps of backstory, and moments of male tension, are allowed to emerge…
In the end we’re not quite sure what we’ve just seen – and a quick check on Wikipedia for some of the traditions and rituals described in the film leaves us even more baffled, as they seem not to actually exist. Neither does ‘Aist Sergeyev’, the writer who supposedly wrote the story The Buntings on which (according to the credits) the film was based… It would be wrong to think of Silent Souls’ blend of legend and fiction as mockumentary; it seems closer in spirit to the odd fables of Jorge Luis Borges.” — Lee Marshall, Screendaily
“The biggest surprise of the year – I haven’t seen a Russian film in a while that so vividly invokes Tarkovsky, without trying hard to do so. It’s an incredibly humorous film too, although its contemplations on love, identity and transience – as in all great Russian art – come across as very sad. A masterpiece.” — Vlastimir Sudar, Sight & Sound THE FIRST GRADER “Set in Kenya in 2003, The First Grader is the story of Maruge, an 84-year-old village elder who uses a government initiative to introduce free primary schooling to claim the education he has always craved. A former Mau Mau fighter, Maruge’s desire to learn to read and write has been sparked by the arrival of an important letter from the government. However, when he presents himself at the local school gates, he finds head teacher Jane alone in being sympathetic to his cause: her colleagues are unenthusiastic and her superiors appalled… Shooting in the stunning Kenyan Rift Valley, and using a real school and its pupils, gives the film an authentic sense of place and community, and the children’s uninhibited, natural performances are a joy to watch. There is humour woven throughout, and a heartwarming affection and mutual respect between the dignified old man and his passionately progressive young teacher.” — Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival ANTON CHECKOV’S THE DUEL Based on his 1891 novella, The Duel gives pictorial life to a classic Chekhovian tale and brings much shrewd understanding to its ageless tale of temperamentally opposed 20-somethings acting out. Laevsky, a moody young aristocrat, and Nadya, his fickle (married) mistress, have retreated from the city to a summering spot by theBlack Sea. Their growing mutual tetchiness catches the disapproving eye of Van Koren, a handsome zoologist (and avid Darwinian) working nearby. Shot gorgeously, in limpid, deep hues, inCroatia, the film is performed acutely well by a perfect ensemble of mainly English and Irish actors. — BG
“Calling a film Anton Chekhov’s The Duel underscores the writer’s pride of place as the prime mover in this expert literary adaptation. But if it weren’t for the masterful work of director Dover Kosashvili this rich, evocative film wouldn’t have nearly the impact it does.” — Kenneth Turan, LA Times
“The Duel comes about as close to soap-opera passion as the virtuoso of wistful lethargy is likely to get. Perhaps ‘comic opera’ is the operative term: adultery, betrayal, blackmail, drunken antics, and all manner of peculiar impulse behavior enliven the summery indolence of a Black Sea backwater… The Duel is intelligently staged and impeccably crafted… The period atmosphere is sensuous; the postcard setting feels lived-in. Kosashvili, whose Late Marriage [NZIFF02] was a superbly volatile generational farce, gives the Masterpiece Theater tradition a welcome zetz… The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I’ve seen since Pascal Ferran’s 2006 Lady Chatterley.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice MEEK’S CUTOFF Kelly Reichardt’s beautiful, eerily poetic alt-Western follows three families heading west in 1845, their tiny wagon train lost somewhere in Oregon. Intimate in detail but epic in implication, Meek’s Cutoff quietly defies the abiding Westward Ho! mythology to privilege women’s experience and to picture the settlers, hauntingly, as fearful, foolhardy venturers in an unending wilderness. — BG
“Kelly Reichardt uses landscape and natural sound to convey American restlessness and uncertainty even more pointedly than she did in her two previous great films, Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy. With a patch of American history as her starting point – there really was a Stephen Meek, a touted mountain scout who, in 1845, led a wagon train of settlers to nowhere in the high desert of eastern Oregon – Reichardt and her writer, Jon Raymond, focus on the settlers’ daily, dreary challenge of putting one foot in front of the other on unfamiliar ground…
Michelle Williams plays one of the toiling wives (Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan play the others, all in sunbonnets that block their view of the horizon). And the actress, with her calm center, compresses the entire history of frontier wifeliness into the concentration with which she gathers firewood and loads a musket. As for Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), the unreliable leader in whom the settlers first put their trust, well: As a search for water becomes desperate, group murmuring turns to whether Meek is a know-nothing, a liar, a madman, or someone even more dangerous. Under Oregonskies, there’s political subtext for the taking in this terrific, unsettling film.” — Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly BEGINNERS In a romantic comedy of appealing depth and thoughtfulness, Oliver, a Los Angeles graphic designer (Ewan McGregor, slow-burningly charming) ponders his budding new relationship with a mercurial young actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent). In effect he’s considering his own dismal record of commitment-phobia in the light of what he’s been finding out about his parents’ marriage. Providing punchy magazine cut-up collages to characterise each era, the film moves easily amongst several time periods to achieve an affecting appreciation of their uneasy union.
Writer/director Mike Mills (who is married to artist/filmmaker Miranda July) has based his film on experience: almost immediately after the death of his mother, his 75-year-old father announced that he was gay, always had been, and intended finally to do something about it. As Oliver’s father, Christopher Plummer is wonderful. He tempers the old man’s headlong pursuit of love and liberation with incredulous delight at his own lack of embarrassment. He is perfectly matched by McGregor and their tender mutual perplexity suffuses the movie. With its playfully loopy tone – the unspoken concerns of the Jack Russell terrier Oliver inherits from his father are conveyed in subtitles – Beginners is also thoroughly inflected with its young heroine’s delight in exploratory role-playing. Mills himself drafted the heart-breaking line drawings that are Oliver’s stock in trade. — BG
“This is a moving and layered work with lots of laughs and all the poignancy of a son’s love letter to his father.” — Pam Grady, San Francisco International Film Festival TERRI Not all the oddballs in this gentle, but sharply calibrated comedy of high school freak-hood are students: Mr Fitzgerald, the nervy vice-principal, suspects that he’s as big a loser as any of them. Played with sputtering comic brilliance by John C. Reilly, Fitzgerald even sees something of himself in Terri, a lonely watchful, giant tub of a boy so inured to schoolyard taunts that he turns up to class in his pyjamas. ‘Life is a mess, dude,’ is teacher’s mantra as he plays furtive social catalyst, nudging Terri and his other favourite ‘at-risk’ kids toward mutual outcast appreciation, not something outcasts are generally noted for. When Terri and his new friends party it up, the air crackles with potential – and that includes the potential for any one of them to flame out. Terri is funny not just because it’s dead-on, but also because it’s clearly and unsentimentally on the alienated team. Fear not: no one here seriously expects you to cuddle a freak. — BG WILD RIVER Elia Kazan may forever be identified with the fury and anguish of Brando and Dean in On the Waterfront and East of Eden. The emotions that animate Kazan’s too little known Wild River are more subtle, but the performances are equally transfixing. Montgomery Clift is an official dispatched to Depression-era Tennessee to persuade an elderly matriarch to take the government pay-out and leave her island plantation before it is flooded by Roosevelt’s mammoth TVA scheme. Startled by the imaginative power of the old woman’s intransigence (Jo Van Fleet is a grizzled force of nature) and stunned by her widowed granddaughter’s (Lee Remick) desire for him, the good-natured progressive finds himself less sure of his ground. The political arguments that course through Wild River have certainly not been settled in the 50 years since it was made. The autumnal lyricism of its cinematography glows anew in this gorgeous Film Foundation restoration. — BG
“A project Kazan nursed for 25 years, after his first visits to the region in the 30s, and the most atmospheric of his works… Clift [was] never so sharp and subtle, a tentative smile, a flick of the eye, a nod conveying the shy city intellectual with an awakening heart and a hidden vein of iron; Van Fleet, only 37 at the time – her makeup took four hours – even stronger and more dominating than in her East of Eden Oscar-winner; and Remick, moving through loneliness, yearning, passion, and rage to create the most complete and developed among all of Kazan’s characters… Long unavailable, this now can be seen as one of the greatest works of one of America’s greatest directors.” — Film Forum, New York
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