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thumbnail We’ll End Up Together (2020 France)

Comedy, Drama, Genre , comments closed

Director: Guillaume Canet
Starring:   François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Gilles Lellouche
Genre:  Comedy, drama
Duration:   135 mins

Guillaume Canet’s sequel to the star-studded comedy Little White Lies that exploded at the box office in 2010 – Unlike the picture-postcard summer backdrop of that film, We’ll End Up Together opens in the off-season. Max and his wife, Vero, are divorcing, and he’s selling the summerhouse to pay for a debt caused by a bad investment. Two kinds of trouble appear on the horizon: Max’s group of friends have decided to visit him for a surprise party for his 60th birthday, even though they haven’t seen him in ages, and neither Vero nor any of his erstwhile friends know that he intends to sell the place where they hope to stay for a few days..  We’ll End Up Together becomes a story of long-term bonds and the joy of friendship, of suppressed emotions, personal and professional resentments, and the many ways children can both fracture and cement social circles.

thumbnail Fire Will Come (2020 Galicia)

Drama , comments closed

Director: Oliver Laxe
Starring:   Amador Arias, Benedicta Sánchez, Inazio Abrao
Genre: Drama
Duration:   85 mins

A deserving prizewinner in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Oliver Laxe’s third feature studies nature and human nature with equal fascination. Viewers obsessive about spoiler alerts will be thwarted by the very title of Fire Will Come: You know exactly what climax is coming in this rustically beautiful rural parable, but its dreamy, mesmeric power lies in the waiting. An exactingly paced slow burn before it becomes a very fast one, the film follows the daily travails of a convicted pyromaniac high in a remote rural mountain village of Galicia. Middle-aged Amador has returned home to his elderly mother, Benedicta, and her three cows, having been released from prison where he served time for starting a fire that laid waste to half the town. The rhythm of life slows to a gentle hypnosis, until one night, another fire breaks out, threatening to engulf the mountains in towering blaze.

thumbnail The Perfect Candidate (2019 Saudi Arabia)

Comedy , comments closed

Director:  Haifaa Al-Mansour
Starring:  Nora Al Awadh, Dae Al Hilali, Mila Al Zahrani
Genre:  Comedy
Duration:    101 mins

Haifaa al-Mansour, the first Saudi woman to direct a feature (Wadjda), goes back to basics with a story of a female doctor trying to enter politics. Maryam is a plain-speaking country doctor whose desire to help her community is no simple task. One key hurdle – the road which leads to her clinic isn’t paved, and much of her job involves dragging patients across a bog so they can receive treatment. And that’s only part of the fun. If the patient happens to be male, an absurd negotiation then has to take place as to whether Maryam should be allowed to carry out her basic duties, what with her operating in a position above her station as a woman. Can you save a person without touching them, or looking at them? A domestic fable, it takes aim at the everyday misogyny that runs to the roots of Arabian society.

thumbnail Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019 UK)

Documentary, Genre , comments closed

Director: Nick Broomfield
Starring:   Nick Broomfield, Marianne Ihlen, Leonard Cohen
Genre:  Documentary
Duration:   97 mins                     Rated R

Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is renowned filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s most personal and romantic film of his storied career. The documentary starts on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, where Leonard Cohen, then a struggling and unknown fiction writer, and Marianne Ihlen, a single mother with a young son, became part of community of expat artists, writers and musicians. Never-before-seen footage shot by Broomfield and legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker make for a unique portrait of an idyllic 1960’s bohemia. It was a time that left a lasting imprint on both Marianne and Leonard, whose friendship would last another fifty years before their deaths in 2016.

thumbnail The Whistlers (2019 Romania)

Comedy, Genre , comments closed

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Starring:  Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar
Genre:  Comedy
Duration:    97 mins

We all know film noir to be full of shadows; in Corneliu Porumboiu’s winning take on the old genre, the shade that looms largest is that of Nikolai Ceausescu, whose legacy of seething corruption and institutional fear gives a particular local texture to a story of bad cops, ruthless robbers and a femme fatale called Gilda. The fall guy is Cristi, a Bucharest cop whose commanding officer has realised he is on the take and is trying to trip him up; of course, she has her own racket running. Along with a pile of mattresses stuffed with cash, our hang-dog anti-hero finds himself on the small Canary Island of La Gomera learning the local whistling language, which the gangsters use as a police-resistant code. Poromboiu has always been the funniest of the Romanian new wave directors. Here, clearly revelling in the constraints of genre convention, he delivers pure entertainment.

thumbnail The Translators (2020 France)

Genre, Thriller , comments closed

Director: Régis Roinsard
Starring:  Lambert Wilson, Olga Kurylenko, Riccardo Scamarcio
Genre:  Thriller
Duration:    105 mins

Régis Roinsard’s cleverly concocted thriller The Translators is set within the bookish confines of best-selling paperbacks and their ruthless publishers, following a group of talented polyglots caught in a scenario straight out of Agatha Christie. What could have been a dull and very French lecture in modern linguistics becomes a high-stakes whodunit where the usual suspects are not your typical movie culprits. The script is filled with twists, red herrings, false clues and third-act reversals, keeping us guessing until fairly late in the game. Add to that Roisnard’s meticulous sense of craft — already on display in his polished 2012 début, Populaire — and you get an altogether slick package that, like the prized book at the heart of its mystery, is a page-turner that never digs too deep.

thumbnail The Eulogy (2018 Australia)

Documentary, Genre , comments closed

Director: Janine Hosking
Starring:   –
Genre: Documentary
Duration:    100 mins

Drawn from Paul Keating’s searing eulogy at Geoffrey Tozer’s funeral, The Eulogy tells the compelling and tragic story of this unrecognised Australian musician. Tracing the rise and fall of Tozer, the documentary attempts to understand why this virtuoso pianist died alone and destitute at the age of 54. Paul Keating argues that Geoffrey Tozer was the best pianist that Australia has ever produced. What went wrong? In his quest for answers to that question, Melbourne-based conductor and music educator Richard Gill interviews Tozer’s brother, friends and colleagues. Keating recreates his controversial eulogy delivered at Tozer’s funeral in which he accused the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras of neglecting Tozer through ‘indifference’ and ‘contempt’.

thumbnail About Endlessness (2019 Sweden)

Drama, Genre , comments closed

Director: Roy Andersson
Starring:   Bengt Bergius, Anja Broms, Marie Burman
Genre:  Drama
Duration:    73 mins

Swedish director Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence) has been so committed to honing his unique brand of melancholic tragicomedy that even Samuel Beckett would have to tip his hat to him in mournful admiration.  About Endlessness arrives brimful with lost souls and lonely hearts, all making vague efforts to connect with their neighbours. A film that makes the humdrum seem unique and the banal otherworldly, Andersson likes to frame his subjects in medium shot, posing them in drab offices, cafes or train stations, observing them for a few minutes before moving on. These people might be exhibits in some tatty museum of human curiosities. If so, it would be the sort of establishment where the labels on the cases have long since peeled off and the postcards in the gift shop have gone yellow at the edges.

thumbnail The Disappearance of My Mother (2019 Italy )

Documentary, Genre , comments closed

Director: Beniamino Barrese
Starring:   Carlotta Antonelli, Beniamino Barrese, Benedetta Barzini
Genre:  Documentary
Duration:   94 mins

Benedetta Barzini at the age of 75 wants to disappear. Her desire began when she was quite young. In her teenage diary, Barzini wrote that her mother, who came from a wealthy Italian family, cared only about money and saw her daughter’s beauty as a commodity. Out of spite, Barzini stopped eating. As her anorexia progressed, she found pleasure in watching her body vanish. That body, thin and athletic, and her strong-boned, perfectly proportioned face made her a “supermodel” in the mid-’60s. She became a muse to Warhol, Dali, Pen and Avedon. As radical feminist in the 1970’s, she fought for the rights and emancipation of women. As her son Beniamino witnesses her journey, the making of the film turns into a battle between mother and son, a stubborn fight to capture the ultimate image of Benedetta – the image of her liberation.

thumbnail The Lighthouse (2019 USA )

Drama, Genre , comments closed

Director: Robert Eggers
Starring:   Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman |
Genre: Drama
Duration:    110 mins                 Rated R

While Robert Eggers’ 2017 film The Witch explored the insidious effect of fairy tales on a small God-fearing community, the writer/director’s follow-up shows how such stories can corrupt the mind of an individual. The elder, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), is the veteran, a thickly bearded, salty old dog. He’s an absolute tyrant and a bully and it seems his former assistant lost his mind and died. His replacement, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), is new to his job. Previously an itinerant timberman, he’s wracked by guilt at having stood by while a man was drowned in a river and he wants to make a new life for himself. But the longer he stays on the island with a gruff, mean, farting, ranting Dafoe the more he drinks; and the more he drinks the crazier he gets.