“Broadly drawn but intimate in scope, Killer of Sheep is populated by miniature moments – eye movements, bursts of happiness, small crushing failures (e.g. the memorable picnic scene). It also feels authentic – documentary-like with its muted black and white imagery, yet tightly scripted and structured. Consequently, some of the non-actors’ work is a little wooden, but that also allows for a story that doesn’t exploit its characters or its setting. It’s consequently highly political in its effect and tone. But even more, it’s a rare privilege to see such a piece of filmmaking that shows real-life as bleak, funny, high-spirited, crushing, happy and angry. In essence, as life really is.”...[Read More]

Also from BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM: Scottish surprise Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness, “a beautiful, moving and hilarious work” on one man’s earnest attempts to introduce a mobile disco to the people of the Scottish Highlands. SIMON SWEETMAN on the late Arthur Lee’s cult psychedelic band: “Love Story is not quite as personal as The Devil And Daniel Johnston or the splendid Roky Erikson film from last year – but it’s a similar story; one of a musical act falling apart at the seams. Kerry and Hall, British filmmakers, do not really get at the dissipation of the band – the drug issue is raised – and though this never falls in to total hagiography it is intended to be a loving portrait of an important, but overlooked band.”

Plus, TIM WONG with further short ends: documentaries Con Man Confidential (on Germany’s equivalent of Nigerian fraudsters), Comrades in Dreams (on cinema’s mobilization of audiences and exhibitors alike) and Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life companion piece, Dong (on painter Liu Ziao-dong and the extraterrestrial Three Gorges Dam); plus a trio in feature film debutants in Andrea Arnold’s CCTV stalker movie Red Road, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo’s consumate Spanish thriller The Night of the Sunflowers, and under auspices of Johnnie To’s Milkyway productions, Yau Nai-hoi’s more genre-oriented surveillance policier Eye in the Sky.