Like a slightly less grim Michael Haneke film, Romanian drama Graduation is a story of moral crisis told in a raw and understated manner. The film centres around 50-something surgeon Romeo (Adrian Titieni) who, despite his prestigious career, lives in a grim-looking housing estate in Transylvania with his wife Magda (Lia Bugnar) – from whom he sleeps separately – and
Read moreThe film Churchill often feels as if director Johnathon Teplitzky and writer Alex von Tunzelmann have taken The King’s Speech and replaced King George the Sixth with Winston Churchill. Both films are about a British leader confronting self-doubt and the crushing responsibility to their people in the dark days of the Second World War. Churchill is not a comprehensive biopic
Read more1979 was a tumultuous year particularly in the US where the Iran hostage saga, an energy crises and economic and social fragmentation severely dented the nation’s sense of supremacy and led to serious lack of confidence in the political system and the values that had driven the nation since its founding; something upon which Ronald Reagan and corporate America later
Read moreA strange mash-up of M Night Shyamalan’s better work and Meet the Parents, the socially perceptive, comedy-inflected horror film Get Out is an impressive directorial debut for Jordan Peel. Here, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is the boyfriend nervously heading to a first encounter with his girlfriend’s parents. He’s particularly anxious because his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) hasn’t mentioned to
Read moreCelebrated and provocative French director Francois Ozon’s latest film Frantz is a slow-moving but undeniably affecting piece of cinematic art. Set in 1919 with Europe physically and emotionally scarred by the First World War, the film focuses on young German woman Anna (Paula Beer) whose fiancée Frantz (Anton von Lucke) was killed in the trenches in France. Visiting the cemetery
Read moreIranian director Ashgar Farhadi’s The Salesman recently won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Farhadi caused the evening’s second most controversial moment when he refused to appear because of his disapproval of the US government’s travel ban on citizens from selected countries. Instead he had an Iranian-American engineer Anousheh Ansari read a powerful statement about the dangers of divisiveness.
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