“Quietly announcing its intended pace and tone in the very first image – an extended shot of a withered pine forest penetrated by waning light and the slow-dancing colours of dusk, an opening that vaguely recalls Aleksandr Sokurov’s unforgettable entry into his Spiritual Voices – Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (the Dutch filmmaker’s third feature film) slowly begins to set up a series of moments and micro-events involving a quadri-generational family in the midst of a crisis – a process that would continue until the very last image,” writes MUBARAK ALI...[Read More]

In other newly added festival reviews and commentary: TIM WONG samples a brace of tough-as-nails Korean gangster pictures in No Mercy for the Rude (“occasionally straddles an artful line between humour and seriousness”) and A Dirty Carnival (“Propelled by one extraordinarily brutal scene of turf war... that can only be described as Braveheart with baseball bats meets (Alan Clarke’s) The Firm”), plus a neighbouring documentary in The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, about a new class of Japanese ‘host boy’ (“[a film that] gets under the skin of what on the surface appears to be just another throwaway leisure pursuit of the rich and emotionally needy”).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM latest viewings include Falkenberg Farewell (“this quietly beautiful film captures that limbo between youth and adulthood, a time of no direction, promise, confusion, loss, dreams... a highly emotional, moving and haunting film that captures this crucial moment of life so well”) and Brazilian broadside Manda Bala (“[Jason] Kohn takes a sweeping look at the corruption and inequality rife in Brazil, and makes a cogent and powerful documentary in the process”). SIMON SWEETMAN also offers second thoughts on Jesus Camp (“frequently hilarious and often downright frightening... another winner from the people who made the acclaimed film The Boys Of Baraka”).