Overview of The Lumière Reader’s Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage. Includes summary of all features, reviews, form guide entries, and festival commentaries.

Bruised by another grueling Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, TIM WONG discovered the hardest hitters were those who refused to yield to convention in a programme of largely complacent, uncompelling tone.

JACOB POWELL learned not to judge the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals by its cover, encountering a satisfying and surprising programme that belied its middling appearance.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Fuller’s Big Valley.

SAMUEL FULLER seems to be so ambivalent about everything, that you have no idea how to take some of his films. As a commentator on this website astutely noticed about Pickup on South Street, there appeared to be a lot of male-on-female violence. However, this is also the director who turned similar violence in The Naked Kiss into a searing indictment on the treatment of women. Yet this is also the director whose depiction of Charity Hackett in Park Row was anything but charitable. In Forty Guns, Fuller again has a strong female character, and seems to subject her too, to punishment. But this is Sam Fuller – and you can’t seem to pin down his ideological position on anything really.

Laurie Collyer/USA/2006; R4
Madman, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Catherine Bisley

WEARING a yellow singlet top, sporting yellow hair, and with a brown paper bag in hand, Sherry slouches off the bus and onto the city streets. Just released from jail, she heads through a down-and-out neighbourhood to the half-way house. Here she introduces herself as a number. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Sherry is emotionally young, yet physically tough. She is beautiful, but believably so. And she has a great walk. Sherrybaby tracks her attempts to reconnect with the world and with her daughter, Alexis. She meets with plenty of adversity: unfeeling parole officers, aggressive housemates and the machinations of a doe-eyed sister-in-law. On top of this, the return to using constantly threatens.

Experiencing withdrawal symptoms after the excess of the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals? Upcoming film festivals jostling for position include: celebrating architecture with documentaries such as A Crude Awakening (aka Oil Crash) and Antonello and the Architect (from this year’s TNZIFF), the Jasmax Film Festival, on now at various venues throughout the country until August 29; the fifth Date Palm Film Festival, showcasing Middle Eastern/North African features and pertinent documentaries in Wellington and Christchurch throughout September; New Zealand’s only competitive International Documentary Film Festival (DOCNZ) returns for its third edition, a terrific avenue and incubator for local documentary filmmaking presented from late September through to November in Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington; and the always decadent Cathay Pacific Italian Film festival (their opening nights, at the very least), from October in various centres (the programme has yet to be announced). Further details are available on the respective festival websites.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM comments on the current seismic shifts in the New Media landscape – from TiVo, to YouTube, to cellphone proliferation – discussed in depth at Script to Screen’s most recent seminar, part of a monthly series of talks and debates on hot topics in screenwriting.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: stoolies, whores and thieves.

OH, what a great opening. Samuel Fuller kickstarts what may possibly be one of his best films with an opening of such brilliance, you could be forgiven for ignoring the rest of the film. Told mainly in close-ups, Fuller thrusts the viewer immediately into the narrative, the characters and the relationship. A gorgeous young woman (Jean Peters) is dolled up, standing in a crowded subway, holding her bag closely. She’s watched by two men in suits – are they checking her out or is there something more happening? A gaunt blonde man (played by Richard Widmark, arguably never better) pulls up to her, and carefully using his newspaper as a shield, opens her bag and steals her purse. The two men notice something happening but cannot react in time to stop the blonde man leaving. The woman walks off unawares. It’s an electric opening – it’s Bresson’s close-ups in Pickpocket on steroids – and totally kickstarts the film. It’s only later on that we realise that Widmark’s thief (Skip) has pickpocketed something more than just a few dollars.

Side thoughts and footnotes collated from our festival correspondents at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

OSCAR-WINNING Hollywood classic Casablanca will soon pop out the cans in an Indian avatar, titled Ezham Mudra (The Seventh Seal). Director Rajeev Nath will swap Rick’s Café Américain for Dev’s Inn, a restaurant not in the Moroccan desert, but on the beaches of God’s Own Country, Kerala. If Michael Curtiz used the notes of a piano to evoke romance between Rick and Ilsa in wartime Paris and Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Nath will draw on the bloody Sri Lankan civil strife to create melody and mood for his version of three little people. Dashing Humphrey Bogart will be reborn as Suresh Gopi, a popular Malayalam film star, and ravishing Ingrid Bergman will transform into Bollywood’s sexy siren Mandira Bedi.

Odds and ends from the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals (now finished in all four main centres, and on road throughout the rest of the country) as we wind down our year’s coverage: JOE SHEPPARD talks to Cowboys and Communists documentarian Jess Feast about how “the differences between sauerkraut and a sloppy joe symbolises many of the struggles facing Berliners after the wall fell”; roaming the festival, LYNDON BARROIS and ADDOLEY DZEGEDE present New Illustration for You, the Living, Drama/Mex, A Few Days in September, I Served the Kind of England, Priceless, and Eagle vs Shark; JOE SHEPPARD (again) turns his attention to the fraudulence of Michael Moore and Japanese host boys in Manufacturing Dissent and The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief respectively; and KATE BLACKHURST clashes with Julien Temple’s documentary on a punk legend, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

Coverage to date can be overviewed by month (June/July/August), browsed via the Form Guide, or recapped by way of these TNZIFF Dispatches. Also look out for our annual Post-Festival Wrap at the end of the month.

Golden Door is ‘presented’ by Martin Scorsese, which basically means that, though it features European actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg, it has no stars who would appeal to an American audience, so this stamp of approval indicates that if you like films by Martin Scorsese... and it does have an element of Gangs of New York, with a sense of heightened reality and stylistic set pieces.

TIM WONG and KATE BLACKHURST offer duelling perspectives on Taika Waititi’s new New Zealand comedy, Eagle vs Shark. Illustration by ADDOLEY DZEGEDE and LYNDON BARROIS.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: formative film noir.

ORSON WELLES famously threw out the script for Touch Of Evil, and didn’t bother reading the source novel when he made that masterpiece. However, he surely, surely, must have seen Fox B-movie I Wake Up Screaming (aka Hot Spot), made by the forgotten director H Bruce Humberstone. After all, it’s easy to see Welles’ corrupt Quinlan in the corpulent, creeping police detective Ed Cornell of this film. And as Quinlan wasn’t above framing the people he suspected of particular crimes (though to be fair, he was invariably right), Cornell acts mighty suspiciously throughout.

I Served the King of England is a gorgeously whimsical film with serious elements swathed in quirky scenes and luscious cinematography. It is carried almost entirely on the back of Jan Dite (Ivan Barnev) whose charming opportunism never cloys. The mischievous little character is always popping up in the right place at the right time, learning from his mistakes and telling his story through flashbacks and voiceover.

As a fan of Nirvana’s music I resent this documentary. It will elsewhere be described as experimental; that’s just desperation being dressed up as innovation. More importantly it is incorrect. Kurt Cobain: About a Son features sonorous taped interviews with the titular subject riffing on any and every topic, mostly discussing his upbringing and his interest in creative pursuits. The movie plays out with footage of Cobain’s hometown – and if there’s a more depressing place on this earth than Aberdeen, Scotland, it is quite clearly Aberdeen, Seattle – while the taped interviews play, sans real context, in and around pointless shots of hometown folk and guitar shops. Sure, we get the sense of this grey, bleak, industrial shipping town. But we know that already. To call that innovative is to suggest that every “unauthorised” classic-albums documentary rip-off is cutting-edge; this is in fact the most formulaic way to make a movie when you don’t have consent. Sure, Courtenay Love is a cow for so heavily protecting the rights to the music, but John Fogerty’s ‘Fortunate Son’ is not a decent replacement soundtrack, even though it is obviously overreaching in the irony stakes.

Robert Sarkies/NZ/2006; R4
Dendy/Magna Pacific, NZ$34.95 | Reviewed by Shahir Daud

IT IS A shame that Robert Sarkies second feature film had to be renamed just prior to release. One wonders what the haunting title of Aramoana would have done for its distribution chances overseas. Out of the Blue may be an apt replacement, but it’s far too generic a title for a film this powerful.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in DVD. In this installment: Seijun Suzuki x4 (Youth of the Beast, A Tattooed Life, Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill); Curse of the Golden Flower, The Good German, Far From Heaven, Two-Lane Blacktop, Like Minds.

Clint Eastwood/USA/2006; R4 (2-disc SE)
Warner Bros, NZ$39/34.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

CLINT EASTWOOD has invigoratingly interrogated the exciting violence that made his name since Unforgiven. Memorable meditations following that revisionist Western include Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and now Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Flags is based on and around the critical World War Two battle where American troops took Japan’s sacred earth Iwo Jima, a moment captured in an iconic photo of six Americans raising the flag.

A standout cult classic which emerged from beneath the 70s New Hollywood era, under-utilised director Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop is the definitive road movie all others try to approximate. Lacking the pretension present in much existential cinematic exposition, this is movie-making as accessible as it is enigmatic. And damn if I wasn’t excited seeing this in all its beautiful big-screen glory!

Curating movie-themed illustration since 2003, The Lumière Reader presents five new illustrations as part of its Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage by LYNDON BARROIS and ADDOLEY DZEGEDE for You, the Living, Drama/Mex, A Few Days in September, I Served the King of England, Priceless, and Eagle vs Shark. Click on images to enlarge.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is Julien Temple’s documentary about the great man. It is definitely not a documentary about The Clash, which is why they are only one element in the film. It has almost too much information, covering everything from his childhood (as a son of a diplomat), through his squatter art-school drop out phase, to his forgettable acting work, and his final band, The Mescaleros. Let’s face it, it is as lead singer of The Clash that everyone loves and remembers him.

MATT RUSSELL discovers irony is far from obsolete, and is that it has “debased the most powerful instrument we had for highlighting irony in the first place: political satire.” He looks at whether The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and other purveyors of entertaining satire have been compromised.

How many films did you make on your OE? JOE SHEPPARD talks to the remarkably industrious Jess Feast, local director of Cowboys and Communists and guest at the Telecom 36th Wellington Film Festival, about her experiences in Berlin documenting the effects of Germany’s reunification on two very different characters.

The Lumière Reader shifts its frequency of coverage down a notch following the conclusion of Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals’ two major legs, Auckland and Wellington, though continues to dispatch outstanding reviews and reportage for the remainder of August as the festival services Dunedin, Christchurch, before hitting the road to complete a tour of New Zealand’s minor centres through until November. Coverage to date can be overviewed by month (June/July/August), browsed via the Form Guide, or sampled in recaps by way of the The Film Reader’s TNZIFF Dispatches. Also look out for our annual Post-Festival Wrap at the end of the month.

Abroad in China, SAM GASKIN gains fresh insight into a Summer blockbuster, viewed under the conditions of the world’s most populous and rapidly changing nation.

MICHAEL BAY’s Transformers hit cinema screens in China a week after its international release. Why the delay? Well, for one, even sci-fi flicks with all the socio-political ambition of spray-cheese come under the Sauron-esque searching gaze of Chinese censorship.

“By turns infuriating and exhilarating, Inland Empire is David Lynch gone senile: whereas cinema’s dream curator struck gold with the relatively logical narrative capsizing of Mulholland Drive, his latest plunges deeper in search of Hollywood’s back entrances and dark portals, and rarely if ever resurfaces for air. While bewilderment is synonymous with Lynch movies, Inland Empire is so far removed neurologically from anything else in the director’s oeuvre that Lost Highway comes across as unfurnished and comparatively sane; thus, in achieving singularity, it approaches the very edge of insanity. Grasping a long overdue lead role with two hands, Laura Dern (magnificent, playing her most fucked-up character since Citizen Ruth) stars as an actress cast in a promising melodrama – a Polack folktale which just happens to be a remake of a cursed screenplay. There are also phantom prostitutes, musical numbers, sitcom rabbits, copious cameos, and ever-present signs of lurking evil to contend with.” TIM WONG’s tango with Lynch’s latest continues....[Read More]

KATE BLACKHURST on Half Nelson’s dynamic duo, Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps: “It does seem an insubstantial basis for a friendship, but the acting is so good that it works; Gosling is perfectly understated and Epps is the best child actor I’ve seen in a long time without a hint of cutesy precociousness.” She also considers Anton Corbijn’s Control: “The fact that it’s not all doom and gloom is due to fantastic scriptwriting and a stellar supporting cast… [it] ends, as of course you would expect, with ‘Walk in Silence’, and the welling up of emotion induced by that song is an incredible thing to take away from a cinema.”

And in the penultimate weekday report from our Wellington Film Festival correspondent, JOE SHEPPARD calls the shots on The Comics Show (“Shitty stereotypes have always plagued the funnybooks, but [Shirley] Horrocks never falls for all that and quickly gets past the emo/teenage years of marginalised navel-gazing and onto the social commentary”), A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (“Mistakes of the past flash quickly from all directions, like knives; the dual narratives overlap and blur; the voiceovers and title remain obscure: Guide is not an easy film but perfects the art of menace at the heart of a nuclear family about to explode”), and The Unpolished (“With a dual life in Portugal and a life on the run, it might look on paper like The State I Am In, but in exposing the selfishness and hypocrisy that lies behind free love and moral creativity, The Unpolished shares more in common with The Edukators”).

Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine both profile and participate in the burgeoning industry of books, websites and films that seek to debunk or discredit the notoriously polemical filmmaker Michael Moore. But what sets Manufacturing Dissent apart from the rest is the journey of a sweet Canadian lady with honest intentions who really just can’t get an interview with the celebrity firebrand. The narrative parallels – and ultimately casts doubt on – the central premise of Moore’s breakthrough Roger and Me: the refusal of General Motors CEO and chairman Roger Smith to grant him an audience. Following the 2004 Slacker Uprising Tour around US universities (aimed at getting the apathetic youth bloc to vote), Melnyk and Caine evenly document Moore’s controversial history by balancing interviews with friends and foes. In the process of building a case against Moore’s dilatory and bullying tactics they shed light on the fascinating character of someone living under constant public scrutiny, whose career and reputation depends on never giving up ground and creating a persona more trademark than human being. Melnyk and Caine raise crucial questions about the integrity of the documentary genre and even the definition of truth as they sift through a catalogue of inventions, manipulations, equivocations, omissions and – perhaps most deceptive of all – a lack of basic context. As a result, debate about ‘the greater good’ and ‘the means justify the ends’ elevates Manufacturing Dissent above mere party politics and into the loftier spheres of philosophy and ethics.

I went to university in Manchester in the early ’90s partly because of the quality of the degree to be gained, but mainly because of its reputation as the most important and exciting city in Britain (read, the world). Joy Division and Factory Records were the cornerstone on which that reputation was built, a decade earlier, so I was hugely anticipating this biopic of Ian Curtis.

“La vie en rose is a stunning, dramatic and at times brutal film. Marion Cottilard plays Piaf like a confused, wounded bird – her wide blue eyes are what stay with you. The film is not so much interested with the details of Piaf’s professional life, although her rise to fame is charted, but with her personal life – a stream of tragedies that lead to her drug abuse and early death. Although she emerges a triumphant French heroine, her background and coarse private persona are thoroughly (and at some points scathingly) exposed. This is what makes this biopic rise above the rest – it truly interrogates its subject. This ethic, coupled with Cottilard’s dedicated performance and Piaf’s amazing songs makes La vie en rose an excellent centrepiece for the Festival and illuminating viewing for anyone interested in Piaf and her music,” enthuses HELEN SIMS.

“Is Gad Elmaleh (The Valet) trying to typecast himself as the bozo with a heart of gold?” asks JOE SHEPPARD of Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless. He also has questions for György Pálfi’s follow-up to Hukkle: “I got the feeling that the story for Taxidermia was written backwards: we have a taxidermist, now what are some truly appalling things he can stuff, and why?” Anticipating Lady Chatterley, MELODY NIXON finds that “This French/Belgium adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s seminal novel fails to capture much the essence of discovery and release that the book so powerfully conveys,” while BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM is charmed by Irish musical Once: “a wee crowd-pleaser, and [Markéta] Irglová’s performance was one of the most engaging and sweetest I’ve seen in years.” KATE BLACKHURST also offers a second thoughts on Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man.

Festivities draw to a close in Wellington this weekend, however continue in Christchurch and Dunedin this August, followed by a tour of duty through the country’s smaller centres. Meantime, our coverage continues, winding down towards the end of the month. Festival details are available online at nzff.telecom.co.nz.

By turns infuriating and exhilarating, Inland Empire is David Lynch gone senile: whereas cinema’s dream curator struck gold with the relatively logical narrative capsizing of Mulholland Drive, his latest plunges deeper in search of Hollywood’s back entrances and dark portals, and rarely if ever resurfaces for air. While bewilderment is synonymous with Lynch movies, Inland Empire is so far removed neurologically from anything else in the director’s oeuvre that Lost Highway comes across as unfurnished and comparatively sane; thus, in achieving singularity, it approaches the very edge of insanity. Grasping a long overdue lead role with two hands, Laura Dern (magnificent, playing her most fucked-up character since Citizen Ruth) stars as an actress cast in a promising melodrama – a Polack folktale which just happens to be a remake of a cursed screenplay. There are also phantom prostitutes, musical numbers, sitcom rabbits, copious cameos, and ever-present signs of lurking evil to contend with. Lynch unsettles proceedings from the outset with a stilted, oddly retarded mise-en-scene – a shambolic merry-go-round of uncomfortable close-ups, pregnant pauses, and drunken delivery – before pushing us through not one, but a succession of rabbit holes that lead nowhere except down. What this bottomless pit reveals though isn’t so much a descent into lunacy, but a liberation of the mind; no longer hindered by the process of film, Lynch runs amok with the digital format, streaming his unconscious with all the mileage of a YouTube video blog. The murky, pixelated vision certainly adds to the anxiety of the ‘mare, as does the staccato horror: abrupt, ad hoc moments of classic Lynchian terror. For all its maddening incomprehensibility, Inland Empire is never uninteresting, and affirms what Lynch thrill seekers have known since day one: that in relinquishing to the experience, you’ll hang on every low drone, mental trapdoor, and hysterical shriek for dear life. In a nutshell, cinema at its most perilous.—Tim Wong

Plays which use strobe lights must carry warnings. I think films that feature jerky, erratic camera-work should do likewise. The blurred shots, inability to hold the camera still and muffled sound clearly mirror the crack addiction of the main character, but they are also enough to induce headaches, nausea and vomiting. Although Half Nelson is possibly a very good film, I had to sit through most of it with my eyes closed and taking deep breaths. It was unsettling in more ways than one. (Kate suffers from the common, incurable disease, Cinema Vertigo.—Ed)

From its infancy, with the paper rationing of the 1940s, to the current explosion of indie and mainstream, DIY and Internet, The Comics Show concisely captures the amazing breadth and distinctive feel of sequential art in New Zealand. In fifty-odd minutes Shirley Horrocks sketches half a dozen intriguing potraits, each of which could support their own spotlight: self-taught pulp penciller Eric Resetar, who imagined the first All Black on Mars; the sinuous brushwork of bro’Town illustrator Ant Sang and his magnum opus Dharma Punks; or NZ’s Bob Crumb, Barry Linton, whose brilliant work on counterculture comic Strips and miscellaneous epics scream out for printing. Shitty stereotypes have always plagued the funnybooks, but Horrocks never falls for all that and quickly gets past the emo/teenage years of marginalised navel-gazing and onto the social commentary. Chris Knox observes the connection between the (punk) musician’s ethos and comicbooks, while Dylan Horrocks, whose metanarrative Hicksville gave New Zealand a work with real thematic maturity and creative rigor, earns his keep as an eloquent ambassador, especially on the topic of commercial traps awaiting any future industry in Aotearoa. Such logistic considerations are never far from the Kiwi comics crew, but Horrocks always strikes a nice balance, getting the skinny on creative processes, interviewing both blokes and sheilas, and looking forward as well as back. Keep an eye out for the DVD release, and a television slot in early September, for a fascinating look into a long-overdue subject.

The Frames are coming to New Zealand as the opening act for Bob Dylan. With a strong musical reputation, they promise a good live show, having been voted Ireland’s number one live band. However, they are also doing their bit to publicise the Irish film industry as well. Lead actor of Once, Glen Hansard is also the lead singer of the Frames, while the film is written and directed by John Carney, formerly a member of the group.

“Dogs, dreams and all things brass crop up around every pallid corner in You, the Living, a surreal twist on human life in all its depressing glory from Swedish writer and director Roy Andersson. A series of nutty vignettes – all of which may or may not have something to do with the bass drummer and tuba player of the Louisiana Brass Band – uncovers the lighter side of neuroses and finds anxieties in everyday communication. The long, artfully composed shots and the spare dialogue mean You, the Living feels a little like a chain of comic sketches, but the catastrophic weather, fascist imagery, unwavering irony and impossibly wan faces ensure that the greasy, filthy core beneath never remains hidden for too long.” JOE SHEPPARD’s reportage continues....[Read More]

Recapping another bumper series of commentaries out of Wellington, JOE SHEPPARD is thrilled in equal parts with Paprika (“the latest love-letter to cinema from writer/director Satoshi Kon... cements his reputation as the most versatile and intelligent auteur in anime today”) and Exiled (“There’s a lot of humour... but for the most part To ratchets up the tension before releasing it in a preposterously beautiful volley of bullets that John Woo or Quentin Tarantino would be envious of”), while finds positive things in A Few Days in September (“What seems like a rather coy title for a spy film begins to look like a pompous gesture... but ultimately contributes to an interesting reflection on the different attitudes either side of the Atlantic”) and My Best Friend (“this comedy of manners meditates on the problems with the tightest social bond – friendship... [the film] finds the sophisticated and profound in the simple”).

JACOB POWELL moves onto the Festival’s omnibus of local digital shorts, commenting that “2007’s Homegrown: Works on Video programme presents somewhat of a mixed bag, replete with shorts that take you from contemplative musing to shock and anger, heart-warming smiles to several minutes of cringefest. Themes and genres are also widespread, covering comedy, horror-western, shockumentary, experimental and stylised drama-cum-mystery. Overall, the standard was reasonably high – complementing the trend in the Works on Film section of the Homegrown programme.” And in the Festival’s one mildly controversial hotpoint, BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM joins the trenchcoats for Destricted, which includes films by Mathew Barney (“a clash between primordial nature and modern machinery, and was as visually interesting as you’d expect from Barney”), Larry Clark (“whose films rarely display the maturity expressed in Impaled”) and Gaspar Noé (“not usually noted for his philosophical subtlety, but this was a reactionary piece of rubbish”).

This French/Belgium adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s seminal novel fails to capture much the essence of discovery and release that the book so powerfully conveys. The film’s moments of contemplative nature footage, and a retro outfitting of handheld camerawork, obvious zooming, and amateur holiday footage (the Super 8 camera used here a few decades out of sync with the rest of the film’s setting) work to create moments that are aesthetically pleasurable but ultimately plodding, surface level and without spirit.

Is Gad Elmaleh (The Valet) trying to typecast himself as the bozo with a heart of gold? In Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless, he plays Jean, the very lucky bartender at a swanky hotel in Biarritz, whom gold-digger Irène (Audrey Tatou) mistakes for a handsome young tycoon. In way over his head, Jean is soon busted and bankrupted, but as Irène moves to Nice and onto her next sugar daddy, he reluctantly falls into the role of toyboy for an older, jealous woman who can cover his debts. The rest of the film is essentially the hijinks that ensue from his rapid indoctrination in prostituting himself, all the while pining for his teacher, who flits easily between lady and tramp. The effortless, cool jazz themes from Camille Bazbaz are a real highlight and help avoid scrutinising the film for too long, because with its luxury-product placement, dodgy morals and plot contrivances, Priceless is best enjoyed as a Riviera beach: let those evanescent pleasures wash over you and try not to notice that you’re enjoying diversions built around the empires of the Paris Hiltons of this world.

I have to admit, I am not, nor have I ever been a Leonard Cohen fan. I have a healthy suspicion of any songwriter who is described as a poet and has acolytes who speak about him in deferential tones. There is a lot of that in this film, as every man and his dog has been dragged before the camera to pontificate about the magic and the mysticism of the great man and his lyrics. That said, when he speaks for himself, his deep gravely voice reveals touches of humour and cynicism which make him far more likeable. He says when he was born, “the givers hovered over me like a football team, then they took some gifts away – those that didn’t fit they threw back into the void.” He goes on to talk about his songs and his formative experiences; the truth behind Suzanne with her tea and oranges or the Chelsea Hotel.

“There’s a lot about Stephanie Daley that’s uncomfortable – the subject matter (teen pregnancy), the cinematography (a prevalence of close-up, hand-held shots that force the viewer into the characters’ proximity), and the fact that one must subject oneself to a cinema full of overly sympathetic, middle-aged women in order to watch it. But that is perhaps what makes this film so effective. It’s a tense drama that doesn’t try to shield the audience from its characters’ experiences just for the sake of making it more digestible... It’s not an easy film to watch, but writer/director Hilary Brougher has crafted such a compelling story that it’s impossible not to let yourself be drawn into this darker side of suburban America.” KIM CHOE’s review continues....[Read More]

“In a thoughtfully developed story you can sense some hot and sinuous structure flexing in between the lines delivered, behind the scenes depicted. But Four Minutes lacked that. It felt like everything that the scriptwriter knew about this story, was told – baldly... Without the scaffolding a strong backstory provides, this movie’s marvellous embellishments, the cast, the production, the camerawork and so on, exist as merely that. Embellishments. It seems the thing I thought I missed wasn’t really there in the first place.” MYTHILY MEHER considers a German prison drama, while continuing the torrent of festival coverage, JACOB POWELL flitters between a documentary on Factory teamster Danny Williams (“Highlighting the imperfect mechanism of human memory A Walk into the Sea simultaneously showcases the enigmatic cinematic work of a man ahead of his time”), and a throwaway Audrey Tautou vehicle (“if it wasn’t for the fact that Priceless is a French language film, I couldn’t see any reason for it being included in a film festival programme”).

“[Kiyoshi] Kurosawa,” writes JOE SHEPPARD on Retribution, “never flinches from Yoshioka’s desperate spiral into doubt and confusion, wisely ratcheting up the tension with slow psychological traps rather than cutting straight to the freaky fx.” He also finds compelling viewing in the grifter confessions of Con Man Confidential: “these affable and charming swindlers are capable of speaking so effortlessly and improvising such engaging and astonishing stories, they always own the camera.” And in a late festival confirmation, SIMON SWEETMAN turns his attention to the elusive genius on display in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man: “This is one music documentary where you won’t even need an appreciation of the artist’s music before hand... Just take your open mind – and a friend – and discover the magic of one of the most unique and innovative musicians, an under-sung hero who sits somewhere between Warhol, Eno, Bowie and Laurie Anderson.”