Exploitation movie, Bulgarian style. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Zift is an exploitation film curtained in high contrast. A black and white hyper-machismo tale of revenge and revelry, it shamelessly plunders from other noir/revenge/exploitation films and blows it all up in 60s Bulgaria. Assuming that the maxim of a girl and a gun is for prudes, the film frolics in its nudity and violence to the point of ridiculousness. Outrageous camera angles, barely-believable storylines, sordid characters are all necessary to qualify as exploitation these days, so it’s hardly dripping in originality. But despite its unabashed neo-noir silliness, it’s highly watchable, and perhaps offers some sort of critique of Communist Bulgaria. Perhaps.

Irish animators cast their spell over the Book of Kells. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

THE Book of Kells is a venerated tome containing the four gospels of the New Testament, illustrated by Irish monks in the eighth century. The Secret of Kells is the debut animated feature from directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, about a young boy tasked with completing the manuscript’s centerpiece Book of Iona.

New Zealand International Film Festival guest Neil Brand returns with his renowed accompaniment, scoring pre-sound classics The Gold Rush, Spies, The Cat and the Canary and The Black Pirate. The silent pianist speaks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Artist Renzo Martens lectures on Congo’s ‘national asset’. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A SORT of mad homage to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Enjoy Poverty is the result of Dutch artist Renzo Martens’s three years traveling the Congo, documenting the country’s ongoing plunder by foreign interests and our complicity in the ‘poverty industry’. With a purposefully offensive and pyrrhic logic, Martens suggests that poverty should be considered an important natural resource. Foreign aid is, after all, among the Congo’s largest sources of income. With little more than a handheld digicam, the artist-come-director sets off to interview plantation owners and poor labourers. He also meets with NGO workers and UN staffers, as well as foreign journalists who cover the nation’s internal conflict.

A trio of encounters at the New Zealand International Film Festival. By JOE SHEPPARD.

AFTER collaborating with the Berliner Philharmoniker in earlier festival hit Rhythm Is It!, German director Thomas Grube secured unprecedented access to the brilliant and famously autonomous orchestra and filmed their tour of East Asia’s grand cities. The resulting documentary Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony is as much a journey of self-discovery for the filmmaker as it is for the 120-odd musicians and flamboyant conductor Sir Simon Rattle, all of whom explore the tensions implicit in being an individual – and often a perfectionist – working collaboratively in search of the artistic sublime.

The hallowed Berlin Philharmonic is captured on tour in Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony, screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival this July and August. German director Thomas Grube tells BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM how he got his backstage pass.

Audrey Tautou as iconic couturier. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

THERE ARE few names in the world of fashion more iconic than Chanel. Yet, despite her association with elegance, the designer’s beginnings were anything but. Coco avant Chanel, as the film’s title suggests, is more a snapshot of the designer’s early life than conventional biopic, and this is both its success and failing. Director Anne Fontaine chooses to end things just as they become really interesting, which is perhaps due to allegations of an affair with a Nazi spy that damaged Chanel’s post-war reputation in France (it flourished in the United States).

Blokes and their booze. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

TOO MUCH low-budget cinema involves plodding narcissists boorishly indulging themselves. The frequently very funny Daytime Drinking however is a very superior, convivial flick. I raise my glass to it. Straight off we meet four amigos imbibing round a Seoul table heartily laden with booze. Hyuk-jin is upset about romantic matters. His garrulous friends jest about him employing Myspace, then enthuse about a blokes’ trip to bucolic Jeongseon. Hyuk-jin ain’t keen, making all sorts of excuses. “I need to feed my dog.” “How old is your dog?” “Three.” “Your dog can look after itself, even feed itself dessert.” Eventually persuaded, likeable Hyuk-jin turns up in Jeongseon only to finds out the trio have blacked out after a heavy session, and won’t be able to make it for a couple of days. He checks in at a guesthouse run by a remarkably impolite man. “Stop hanging around,” he’s welcomed. Daytime Drinking explores the rowdy comedy of rude behaviour a la Host and Guest.

A fitting tribute to one of the luminaries of New Zealand cinema. By NINA FOWLER.

BARRY BARCLAY passed away a few weeks after The Camera on the Shore’s first rough edit was completed. After the tangi, director Graeme Tuckett applied to Te Mangai Paho for funding to “make the film again from the ground up”. The result is a compelling visual, emotional and intellectual celebration of Barclay’s life and work, with a razor-sharp yet restrained political edge.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevera biopic is a revolution of two halves. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

TWO HUNDRED and seventy-seven minutes is a long time to spend in a cinema. And it’s no surprise that this immense biopic of Che Guevera has been split into two movies for its general release, given the film’s narrative is similarly split: the first half of the film looks at the fight for Cuba and the second looks at Guevera’s attempt to do something similar in Bolivia. Despite its four-and-a-half-hour running time, Che isn’t actually a film about Che Guevera. We’re no closer to knowing about his motivations or his personality (see Motorcycle Diaries or read his books instead for that). Instead, this is about revolution, the way in which social change can, or won’t be, affected by armed conflict.

Close up on celebrated New York portraitist Chuck Close. By JACOB POWELL.

AN ICON in the art world, New York photorealist portrait painter Chuck Close has a bold idiosyncratic style that demands your attention in a way that few modern portrait painters can. Since the 60s Close has owned this often unpopular sector of the painting scene defying both critic and peer to try and write-off his work as mere bland ‘mechanical’ reproduction. And yet this is essentially what he has based his career upon – reproducing painted images from large scale photographic portraits. Take a look at a selection of his works and you’ll soon understand why he has remained a vital fixture in art exhibitions, galleries, museums and literature for the past four decades.

Chantal Akerman’s rigorous study of despair. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

SHOWN in New Zealand for the first time for decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s formally and thematically revolutionary Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles remains a neglected miracle. While Akerman has been referenced by fashionable directors like Todd Haynes (Julianne Moore in Safe and Far From Heaven is the American heir to Dielman’s titular protagonist) or Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent), her work remains criminally under-released and under-appreciated. Jeanne Dielman was made after her brilliantly grungy deconstruction of female sexuality, Je, Tu, Il, Elle, but is even more uncompromising in its depiction of the banal repression of everyday-ness.

Two documentaries cling to a steadily diminishing way of life. By STEVE GARDEN.

THE FILMS of Raymond Depardon are rarely seen in this neck of the woods. Apart from the superb Tenth District Court (NZIFF 2005) and the short film that opens To Each His Own Cinema (one of the better efforts in that patchy concoction), Depardon’s films have not made it this far south (to my knowledge). Which is a pity, because Depardon is obviously a filmmaker worthy of attention, and his new film, Modern Life (Profils Paysans: la vie moderne), could emerge as one of the understated masterworks of this year’s festival.

Ramin Bahrani observes two unfinished lives. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Goodbye Solo is the type of gentle US indie which doesn’t try to bury its story underneath a forced quirkiness or look-at-me tactics. Instead it’s more of a sigh, a quiet film about the passing of time and a demographic changing of the guard in the United States, where the old “white” world typified by Hank Williams is being replaced by a new multi-ethnic world of “reggae, rock n roll and all that”. The story is about a man wanting to commit suicide, and hiring a taxi driver to drive him to the suicide point. If the plot sounds similar to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, it might not be pure ‘coincidence’ – Ramin Bahrani while American, learned film in Iran. And while he doesn’t have the same formal brilliance of Kiarostami (not that many worldwide do), he knows how to use an understated camera-work and narrative ambiguity to gain emotional resonance.

Sam Raimi masterminds a belated horror comeback. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

AT A TIME when the horror genre has been sullied by insipid ultra-violence (there were at last count five Saw sequels with another on the way) and soulless Japanese-Korean-Spanish (take your pick) remakes, Drag Me to Hell leaps of the screen like a precordial thump (that’s a carefully-aimed blow to a cardiac-arrest victim’s sternum to restart their heart).

Winnebago Man tracks down the “angriest man in the world” – the relusive star of a series of expletive-laden outtakes from an RV commercial that went viral. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to director Ben Steinbauer and producer Joel Heller about finding and filming the lovable grump in those clips, Jack Rebney.

The 60s before the 60s; Kazakhstan’s domestic quarrels, historical trauma and lunar steppes. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

“IT DOESN’T have to be teaching you know. There is the civil service.” So Emma Thompson’s headmistress ripostes when Jenny (Carey Mulligan) objects to boring school leading to boring university leading to a boring job and a boring life. The line was heartily responded to at a Wellington screening! Lone Sherfig’s latest film An Education – audience fave at Sundance 2009 – is a crowdpleaser.

Hanging on for dear life in Philipp Stölz’s mountaineering thriller. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

NOT SINCE Touching the Void has such an edge-of-your-seat and nerve-shattering mountaineering film been committed to celluloid. And like that feature, director Philipp Stölz’s North Face is based (rather loosely I imagine) on a true story. It’s 1936 Germany and with the Olympic Games close at hand the Nazi party is lusting after new Aryan idols. Climbers from all over Europe head for the unconqured north face of the Eiger, in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. The first to the top will be presented with gold medals.

Catalan director Albert Serra, whose sublime Birdsong screens at the New Zealand International Film Festival this July, reveals his filmmaking methods to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM. He’s accompanied by Canadian film critic Mark Peranson, whose documentary Waiting for Sancho shadows the making of Serra’s film.

ALEXANDER BISLEY on several NZIFF highlights the Melbourne International Film Festival will be inheriting.

THE excellent Melbourne International Film Festival, hot on the heels of New Zealand International Film Festival’s, kicks off Friday. Heading across the Tasman from New Zealand screens: 35 Shots of Rum, a very appealing, sensuous Claire Denis film (Beau Travail, The Intruder) about widowed Parisian train driver Lionel (Alex Descas) and his daugher Josephine (Mati Diop). It’s Denis homage’s to Ozu, her mother, and her Brazilian grandfather. 35 Shots poignantly tracks Lionel’s emotions as Josephine’s romance with Noe (Gregoire Colin) blossoms. Lionel’s admiration for his daughter is varied with nervousness as he reflects on her moving away from him. As he tells his struggling friend Rene: “She keeps my dark thoughts at bay.” When I interviewed Denis she talked tenderly about Descas, Diop, Paris’ Afro-Caribbean community and her mother being the first to see 35 Shots. “Of course she recognised parts of her own experience. I think she was very moved. But my mother is not a woman who shows too much emotion.” Claire Denis will appear in conversation with The Age’s Philippa Hawker. Ninety minutes up close.

STEVE GARDEN shares notes on some of his favourite – and least favourite – discoveries at the New Zealand International Film Festival to date. Appraised: Theater of War, Teza, Firaaq, The Baader Meinhof Complex, Van Dieman’s Land, Samson and Delilah.

Further thoughts on the year’s most radical film. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Our Beloved Month of August may just be the most radical film showing at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. A heady mixture of fiction and documentary (and both at the same time), Miguel Gomes evokes the nostalgia of painful summer love in the Portuguese countryside with considerable verve. And in the process, Gomes may have set up a revolutionary template on how to film a community when the director is an outsider (or even an insider). A moving, languid dream of a movie, this is a stunning piece of filmmaking.

In aid of dolphins. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

WITH A SPY-THRILLER intellect and activist spirit, The Cove is an utterly compelling exploration of the dolphin trade, and the efforts of one passionate individual to tear it down. That one man is Richard O’Barry, the former dolphin trainer for iconic 1960s television show Flipper, who blames himself for fuelling the world’s obsession with SeaWorld-type parks. Ever since the show’s aquatic star died – O’Barry contends she committed suicide – he’s devoted himself to freeing dolphins held in captivity.

Park Chan-wook on the pleasures and burden of being undead. By JACOB POWELL.

GET THIS: Catholic Priest signs up for bizarre experimental medical research project, becomes the first subject to survive, and now he’s a Vampire. And still working as a priest. With guilt issues! Could a film sound any better than that? Unless you have vampire aversion, the biggest road block Thirst faces is underwhelming audiences after such a bizarre and promsing premise. But as if – Korean stylist Park Chan-wook (J.S.A., Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy) has hit this incredibly twisted and malleable nail on its head.

Extoling the worst movie ever made. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

Best Worst Movie might just be the most enjoyable film ever made about the most implausibly awful movie ever made. To be fair, there are cinematic train wrecks far worse than the straight-to-video 1990 release Troll 2 (which doesn’t feature trolls or bear any relation to the first Troll film) – what sets this celluloid gem apart is the sincerity of its cast and crew.

A deeply unsettling and resonant tale of barbarism from Australia’s convict past, Van Diemen’s Land is a hugely impressive debut. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks its director, Jonathan auf der Heide, and lead actor/co-writer Oscar Redding, about their vision of hell.

Alexander Lukashenko’s totalitarian regime exposed. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

Themis as a Lady of Loose Morals is not a particularly subtle film. But there must come a point when there’s no point in sugar-coating things, particularly when your country’s struggle is barely heard on the international stage. The documentary looks at Belarus, a country which even Condoleezza Rice declared an “outpost of tyranny”. Led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is notorious for its Soviet-style approach to justice and intolerance for political dissent. Director Viktar Dashuk captures some of the repression in his home country in a truly courageous manner – and in the process makes a highly charged piece of political filmmaking.

Size matters in John Woo’s heavy-duty epic. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

Red Cliff is big, loud, a little camp, and stuffed-to-the gills with old-fashioned epicness. It’s also a return to form for John Woo, having spent the last few years wandering Hollywood’s wilderness – if his 1997 Face/Off delivered Tinseltown a blow to the head then 2003’s Paycheck registered a damp squib.

The director of ‘Harvey Krumpet’ moulds another tale of social outcasts. By JACOB POWELL.

UTILISING the clay-mation medium to good effect – with the odd CG touch-up – Australian animator Adam Elliot’s debut feature Mary and Max takes on the odd-couple genre in a sweetly endearing way but injected with a good dose of black humour and without the saccharine coating this kind of story might usually attract.

Another masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

THE LATEST and long-awaited feature from master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is his most gentle to date, exceeding even My Neighbour Totoro in simplicity. With Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea the director is not just pitching for an audience the same age as the film’s five-year-old titular character – but is daring viewers to imaginatively become children themselves.

Stoicism and desperation in So Yong Kim’s tale of abandoned young girls. By TIM WONG.

THE DARDENNE brothers, a semi-permanent fixture of recent New Zealand International Film Festivals, may not have graced us with their presence this year, but their resolute style continues to be felt. In Wendy and Lucy, the brother’s empathy for the underclass has clearly rubbed off on Kelly Reichardt’s film, a seriously aching tale of tough times in Middle America. In Treeless Mountain, another ordeal of sacrifice through hardship, the camera hovers over its motherless ducklings like a guardian angel, never deserting their innocent faces. Although recalling the stony naturalism of the Dardenne’s handheld aesthetic, director So Yong Kim (In Between Days) and her cinematographer, Anne Misawa, lock eyes with their two child stars (Hee Yeon Kim and Song Hee Kim), and with an invisible hand, don’t let go. The compassion expressed through this unwavering, unobtrusive lens is remarkable.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round four.

DESPITE East Germany being in its death-throes, the state was still producing films after the wall came down. The Architects is clearly reflective of the growing liberalisation in late 80s East German society, and the film is none too subtle in its critique of authority and conformity. It ultimately looks at how much an individual has to compromise him or herself in order to fit in, concluding in a rather hard-edged pessimistic manner.

The sweet and sour of Eighties and Nineties nostalgia. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

IN Adventureland a garish amusement park is a metaphor for hormone-addled teen angst and youthful wonderment. Greg Mottola’s auto-biographical coming of age story is no Superbad sequel however, but a work of delightfully bittersweet nostalgia. Thematically the film traces the genre’s well worn path. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) plans to travel to Europe for the summer of 1987, but is forced to find a job at Adventure following his father’s redundancy. Working at the park is a host of suburban archetype social misfits and the elusive Em (Kristen Stewart), who becomes an object of affection and confusion. All this is of course played out to fist-pumping power-pop soundtrack.

Jane Campion and John Keats align stars. By JACOB POWELL.

I’VE NEVER been a big Jane Campion fan but there is a lot to like about her latest labour of love. Beautiful in many senses of the word, Bright Star plays like a poem by the film’s protagonist, English romantic poet John Keats. Although a relatively conventional film (as festival fare goes), its narrative structure is separated into couplets and stanzas with plenty of breathing space between providing a unique rhythm to the work that takes a bit of finding, but is ultimately a satisfying experience. Granted it helps if you have a bent for period films and romance in the broader sense!

Across the border in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s precarious thriller. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

FAMILIES trying to make it to El Norte, the United States, from Latin America have had a long tradition in movies. As have stories about gangsters trying to go straight. It pays not to think too much about this thriller which incorporates the two – it’s certainly a ride of a movie (no pun intended), and knows exactly what it’s doing. In fact, it’s very well constructed – suspense, drama, emotion all get played out with considerable control and energy. Sin Nombre’s characters and ideas are a little problematic, and the story is a little hokey – but it’s an entertaining film nonetheless.

Brutality and hilarity collide in Yorgas Lanthimos’s absurdist family affair. By TIM WONG.

IN THE mean-spirited tradition of Ulrich Seidl’s Dog Days, the dastardly Dogtooth (Kynodontas) goes someway to compensating – along with the excellent Blind Loves, also screening this year – for the Austrian director’s absence from recent New Zealand International Film Festivals (his vaunted Import/Export has yet to reach our shores). The story of captive siblings and their control-freak parents, the film observes its sexually frustrated characters, either on the giving or receiving end of cruel and bullying outbursts, with an inherited misery that’s both hilarious and monstrous to watch. Perversely, the grotesque lineage of Yorgas Lanthimos’s film extends even further towards Seidl’s homeland, whose unfortunate reputation for dungeons and incest now precedes itself. How exactly Dogtooth’s sociopathic figurehead – the Josef Fritzl-lite father of three adult children incarcerated in their own home – avoids this bad taste association completely is, simply put, through a wicked sense of humour. Deadpan editing, satiric know-how, and a consistent black comedy streak ensure Lanthimos’s film rises well above the lower depths its awkward subject matter may have otherwise dragged it down below.

Plumbing the depths of Australia’s barbaric convict past. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

AUSTRALIA has been making some excellent art cinema in the last five or so years (a pointer to what the New Zealand film industry ought to be doing), yet isn’t getting enough credit on the global stage. If there hadn’t already been a “New Wave” in Australia the 70s, these last few years would justify a similar moniker. This year’s New Zealand International Film Festival programme is further proof of this. Van Diemen’s Land is yet another example that auteur driven content and stories dealing with the nation aren’t mutually exclusive. Van Diemen’s Land is a deeply unsettling and resonant tale of barbarism, and a hugely impressive debut feature by its director Jonathan auf der Heide.

Unknown pleasures abound in Miguel Gomes’s utterly unique film. By STEVE GARDEN.

Our Beloved Month of August is the second feature by the relatively unknown Portuguese filmmaker, Miguel Gomes. On the strength of this film, he probably won’t be unknown for long, but he could have as many naysayers as fans. Personally, I’m happy to side with those who see quality and potential in Gomes, but as good as August is, I can’t quite go so far as to declare it the masterpiece that some have. At 150 minutes, it might just be a little leisurely, and the freewheeling style of the first half is likely to irritate some. However, if you have patience for the slow (very slow) build up, there are plenty of subtle bits-of-business to savour. Just don’t expect the film to take any meaningful narrative shape for a good hour – at least!

Reviewed by Danyl McLauchlan

Brüno is no Borat. The most telling difference is in the voice – Borat’s clumsy accented English never wavered but every now and then Brüno’s lisping faux-Austrian inflection lapses into the very posh Oxbridge drawl of his creator Sacha Baron Cohen and the illusion behind the movie falters. Such a slip never befell Borat – a key ingredient to his success was that the performance was so overwhelming: it was easy to imagine we really were watching a presenter for Kazakh TV while he adventured across the US on a quest to meet Pamela Anderson and kidnap her in his Kazakh wedding sack.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Goethe Institut selects, round three.

THE FILM SOCIETY’s East German rendezvous continues with Her Third, a rom-com socialist style, which pleads for women’s rights in its own particular way. Following the travails of an ex-nun-solo-mother-potential-lesbian, with two children from two different relationships as she searches for Mr Right (who happens to work in the chemical factory with her), Her Third gently asks for equal rights in relationships. While it has certainly dated, and seems like a curious slice of 70s socialism, some of its concerns about female bonding and relationship behaviour still resonate. And even if the whole film is occasionally rather silly, it shows that despite the barriers of the Cold War, women and men the world-over have to go to great lengths for something that evolution had initially made so simple.

From Tangata Whenua to Ngati, Graeme Tuckett talks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about documenting the legacy of Barry Barclay – the late, great Kiwi filmmaker in retrospective at the New Zealand International Film Festival this July and August.

Eight full-bodied minds talk the talk. By STEVE GARDEN.

ASTRA TAYLOR’s Examined Life is a buoyant, life-affirming 90-minutes in the company of a handful of today’s most renowned thinkers – the most conspicuous of which, Slavoj Zizek, was the subject of Taylor’s enthusiastic 2005 profile of the vanguard cultural philosopher, entitled Zizek!. With barely ten minutes to articulate the barely articulable, they wander around various internal and external environments (the locations give an additional subtly ironic emphasis to the ruminations) attempting to clarify the value of philosophic thought. Whether they succeed or not depends on one’s point-of-view, but Taylor deserves credit for never allowing the talk to slip into dry esoteric irrelevance. All of the participants essentially acknowledge the correlation between philosophic thought and social responsibility, particularly when nihilistic self-regard can easily be seen as the subtextual norm in today’s world.

Manoel de Oliveira’s century of cinema continues. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA has been making films since the silent era, and if the reputation of his earlier work is anything to go by, he’s been a hard filmmaker to pin down stylistically or thematically. On a side-note, his earlier masterpieces are in desperate need of increased availability. Turning one hundred hasn’t slowed the Portuguese master down either, and his frequent appearances in recent festivals show he’s still willing to experiment. His latest, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Singularidades de uma rapariga loura) is a very old-fashioned narrative, full of suitors, guardians and love-at-first-sight. However, de Oliveira’s approach is anything but old-fashioned, an immaculately shot dream, that wryly concludes things are much more complex beneath the surface.

Unrequited love, according to Jerzy Skolimowki. By STEVE GARDEN.

JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI kicked off his directorial career in the mid-60s with a run of very impressive films, notably Identification Marks, None (1964), Walkover (1965) and Barrier (1966). His international productions include Le Depart (1967), Deep End (1971), The Shout (1978) and his best-known film, Moonlighting (1982). Following the disastrous Ferdydurke (1991), Skolimowski packed up his directorial chair to focus on painting and poetry, but after a spot of acting in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, he felt encouraged to return to filmmaking. Unfurling the story of one man’s eccentric, obsessional love for his neighbour – and the voyeuristic courtship that follows – Four Nights With Anna (Cztery Noce z Anna) is the result.

Catherine Breillat subverts a classic Charles Perrault fairytale. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM. (contains spoilers)

CATHERINE BREILLAT is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest directors, and unfortunately a director whose reputation is more renowned for her unflinching images than the provocative ideas which accompany them. Half the audience walked out of the tampon scene in Anatomy of Hell a few film festivals ago, and most of that group wouldn’t have considered why they considered it disgusting in the first place. After all, it’s just blood isn’t it? Bluebeard (La Barbe Bleue) is another piece of brilliance, as she takes an oft-filmed Charles Perrault fairytale and adds her own vision on the proceedings. Her underrated visual sense is as gorgeous as ever; her thematic concepts as challenging as ever.

The everlasting regret of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s pensive family drama. By STEVE GARDEN.

THE TITLE of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film reflects the formal qualities of the work as much as the thematic and philosophic ones. With its natural rhythms and locked-off static cinematography (apart from one telling shot near the end), Still Walking is indeed very still, with the pace of a gentle summer stroll. Kore-eda paints with delicate brushstrokes, but beneath the surface serenity lies unresolved grief (a common theme in Kore-eda’s work), which is of course accompanied by a poisonous concoction of disappointment, betrayal, contempt, unfulfilled expectations, lack of self-worth, bitterness and anger. As one character desperately puts it, it’s just normal family life!