Simon Stadler’s Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’Hoansi follows the Ju/’Hoansi of Namibia – who have been legally barred from hunting – as they mesh with the nation’s urban culture and the western culture of Europe.
After a long, ten-year stint in filmmaker jail, Mel Gibson has returned with Hacksaw Ridge: a gruesomely violent WWII biopic about Desmond Doss, a medic and devout Seventh Day Adventist, who saved the lives of over 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa without killing a single enemy combatant. Hacksaw Ridge features Gibson’s typical heavy-handed religious symbolism to great effect here, and serves as an unnerving contrast to the graphic violence in the film’s third…
Victor Kanefsky’s Art Bastard asks broad questions about the relationship between art and politics. Its subject, American artist Robert Cenedella, serves a micro-answer to some of these broad questions. Although Kanefsky is successful in arguing for Cenedella’s work as critical satirical representations of U.S. political culture, the film lacks energy.
The Unknown Girl marks another incredible achievement by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. Following up their equally brilliant Two Days, One Night, the Daredennes deploy their clinically austere style to great means in The Unknown Girl, which doubly serves as an investigation and character study.
Contemporary cinephilia places – at times – undue emphasis on the auteur in relation to their work and in relation to the works of others. Intertwined authorship and intertextuality are the two most recurrent approaches in film criticism. As such, it’s easy to rationalize the existence of the Hitchcock/Truffaut: Magnificent Obsessions retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, given the sheer amount of discourse written on the famous relationship of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut.
For a career that spans nearly 5 decades, Brian De Palma’s style and subject as a filmmaker remains strikingly consistent. Unlike his New Hollywood contemporaries (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola), De Palma has never strayed far from his generic comfort zone.
It’s been three years since audiences flocked to the largely forgettable yet surprising box office hit Now You See Me, a crime thriller about a Robin Hood-esque band of highly skilled magicians who perform elaborate cons to rob the rich of their money. After taking in roughly $350 million worldwide, the film has apparently merited a sequel – the equally forgettable Now You See Me 2.
After a 5-year hiatus, English filmmaker Terence Davies returns with Sunset Song, an adaptation of the seminal Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Davies’ traditionally melodramatic and stilted approach to writing drama is on display here, and a great hindrance to this adaptation.
Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia is a spiritual successor to his innovative 2002 film Russian Ark, more so thematically than aesthetically. Russian Ark was a narrativized tour of The Hermitage that doubly served as a re-enactment of parts of Russian history. The most important fact about Russian Ark, however, is that it was shot entirely in one take – a formal element missing from Sokurov’s new film.
Still hot off the success of his previous two accolade-winning films (Dallas Buyers Club [2013] and Wild [2014]), Jean-Marc Vallée explores similar themes in a less formulaic way with his latest dramedy Demolition.