Category: Reviews
You’ve Been Trumped: Documenting Donald Trump’s Scottish Incursion
The title could just about sum up this blood-boiling 2011 documentary directed by Anthony Baxter and produced and co-written by Richard Phinney, a festival fave finally released on DVD a few months ago. At face value, it’s a gritty, ground-level film witness to Donald Trump’s unsubtle tactics in pushing through plans to build an enormous…
The Dance of Reality: Jodorowsky returns and remembers
I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill. – Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo: The Book of the Film Alejandro…
A Hijacking: Yet another airtight Danish thriller
There are two types of narrative filmmakers in this world (stay with me for a minute). Firstly, there are those who seek to have their films overtly participate in the drama that they present, depending on sophisticated camera work, powerful scores, expressive performances and dramatic narrative developments. Then there are those who stand back from…
Hong Kil Dong: The Ironic and the Indestructible
At a recent Melbourne International Film Festival screening of North Korea’s little seen gem, Hong Kil Dong (1986), one attendee enthusiastically declared to the entire cinema that it was the best film he’d ever seen. His statement was not delivered without irony, but he still meant it. The story, so far as it goes, is…
All is Lost: A cinematic exploration of human dignity in a gargantuan, gorgeous and indifferent universe
“He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea It would be difficult for anybody who has read Hemingway’s novella to put it out of mind when watching J. C. Chandor’s latest film, All is Lost. They…