“Dogs, dreams and all things brass crop up around every pallid corner in You, the Living, a surreal twist on human life in all its depressing glory from Swedish writer and director Roy Andersson. A series of nutty vignettes – all of which may or may not have something to do with the bass drummer and tuba player of the Louisiana Brass Band – uncovers the lighter side of neuroses and finds anxieties in everyday communication. The long, artfully composed shots and the spare dialogue mean You, the Living feels a little like a chain of comic sketches, but the catastrophic weather, fascist imagery, unwavering irony and impossibly wan faces ensure that the greasy, filthy core beneath never remains hidden for too long.” JOE SHEPPARD’s reportage continues....[Read More]

Recapping another bumper series of commentaries out of Wellington, JOE SHEPPARD is thrilled in equal parts with Paprika (“the latest love-letter to cinema from writer/director Satoshi Kon... cements his reputation as the most versatile and intelligent auteur in anime today”) and Exiled (“There’s a lot of humour... but for the most part To ratchets up the tension before releasing it in a preposterously beautiful volley of bullets that John Woo or Quentin Tarantino would be envious of”), while finds positive things in A Few Days in September (“What seems like a rather coy title for a spy film begins to look like a pompous gesture... but ultimately contributes to an interesting reflection on the different attitudes either side of the Atlantic”) and My Best Friend (“this comedy of manners meditates on the problems with the tightest social bond – friendship... [the film] finds the sophisticated and profound in the simple”).

JACOB POWELL moves onto the Festival’s omnibus of local digital shorts, commenting that “2007’s Homegrown: Works on Video programme presents somewhat of a mixed bag, replete with shorts that take you from contemplative musing to shock and anger, heart-warming smiles to several minutes of cringefest. Themes and genres are also widespread, covering comedy, horror-western, shockumentary, experimental and stylised drama-cum-mystery. Overall, the standard was reasonably high – complementing the trend in the Works on Film section of the Homegrown programme.” And in the Festival’s one mildly controversial hotpoint, BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM joins the trenchcoats for Destricted, which includes films by Mathew Barney (“a clash between primordial nature and modern machinery, and was as visually interesting as you’d expect from Barney”), Larry Clark (“whose films rarely display the maturity expressed in Impaled”) and Gaspar Noé (“not usually noted for his philosophical subtlety, but this was a reactionary piece of rubbish”).