“On their own, [Edward] Burtynsky’s photographs are both pleasing to the eye and terrifying. But his wide scope has a tendency to dehumanize. A disappointed labourer comments on not being able to make himself out in a photo: “It’s very broad. It’s hard to see the detail.” Seen alongside Mettler and Powis’s footage, we see how Burtynsky can cut through industrial smog, sharpen edges and colours. It is though the stylish combination of these three men’s work and the associated interviews that we are confronted. While it largely avoids “we have to take responsibility” soundbytes, Manufactured Landscapes amounts to a trenchant criticism of galloping global consumption. China got legs, who can stop it?” CATHERINE BISLEY’s review continues....[Read More]

Surmising our most recent torrent of festival columns and reviews, JACOB POWELL (“Free from documentary restraint, the master director occasionally overindulges his melodramatic tendencies with the odd scene which could have leapt straight out of An Officer and a Gentleman, or even worse, a Steven Seagal film”) and TIM WONG (“In the weathered hands of Herzog... such concessions are almost entirely forgivable, and while amiably servicing the film’s commercial needs, he also circumvents any pressure to mythologize Dieter Dengler’s capture and escape”) offer a head-to-head on Rescue Dawn. Also from TIM WONG: The Boss of it All (“jarring, consistently hilarious, and ridiculous beyond belief – indeed, there’s only so clowning around a film can take before its backlog of absurdity starts to cancel itself out”) and Venus (“A geriatric male fantasy... Harold and Maude with a sexual understanding”).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM: “You have to wonder what would compel a director to make a sequel to a film forty years later, particularly given that the original, Belle de Jour, is one of the most iconic films of the 1960s, and its director, Luis Buñuel, one of the greatest of all-time... But this distance from the original adds a new dimension to the tale, and Oliveira’s own background infuses Belle toujours with a tinge of nostalgia and age-old wisdom.” And additional thoughts on Explorations of Folded Time: Leighton Pierce (“does highlight the intellectual and artistic explorations that film can indeed facilitate”) and Freedom’s Fury (“An ultimately solid, if unspectacular film that reiterates no matter how much we try and pretend otherwise, sport and politics do indeed mix”).