“In this slow moving indie flick each line that goes unsaid is worth the weight of a hundred lines in any other, more verbose film. Old Joy is a minimalist study in spirit-filled, natural imagery, and emotion; its moments of detached discontent contain both exuberant and mournful glimpses into the darker side of peace. That is, peace how Fellini’s La Dolce Vita character Steiner describes it; “a thin cover, stretched across an abyss”. Old Joy is joy gone stale, and joy that is afraid of the spark it has lost.”...[Read More]

Complementing her estatic review, MELODY NIXON offers parallel insight into one half of Old Joy’s journeymen – folk singing, sometimes-acting poet and musician, Will Oldham – with a personal and praise-filled Appreciation (filed on The Arts Reader).

In further festival previews in the lead-up to Auckland’s Opening Night (A Might Heart) on July 13, SIMON SWEETMAN listens to a punk serenade in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, The Clash frontman who he describes as “A spiritual man, a musical magpie, a quintessential punk who, by virtue of his literal lust for life, transcended the punk subculture”. And on the film itself: “[Julien] Temple, having documented the odyssey of The Sex Pistols... is the perfect person to collect and collate these views on Strummer... Temple is both a filmmaker and a scenester, a hip player with an eye for the detail of how it should be but a head already full of the awareness of the way it was.”

Further still, TIM WONG gets reacquainted with a festival staple, Isabelle Huppert, in Private Property, while BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM checks out two idiosyncratic oddities: raw Mexican talent in The Violin, and Brand upon the Brain!, the latest from an unclassifiable favourite, Guy Maddin. Lumière’s critics also list their Ticklish Tens, or: their ten most anticipated festival films.