Directed by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, the documentary follows what happens when residents fight back against politicians.
The International Film Festival Rotterdam doesn’t just do the no-budget debuts of beginning directors, it also allows glimpses of what is hot in other countries. This is the festival where we got introduced to the Korean classics of the past three decades, J-horror, Miike Takashi and Thai martial arts… Well, this year, the festival hosted a film which was a debut AND an Asian blockbuster: Dương Minh Chiến’s Fish, Fists, and Ambergris. A massive success in its home country of Vietnam, this was the kind of bone-crushing acrobatic jawdropper many festival-goers were waiting for. In Fish, Fists, and Ambergris, a small fishing village in Vietnam has a small temple containing a very valuable statue of a whale, made from ambergris, which is rumored to protect…
Time flies when you’re having fun, and that saying applies to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Last Saturday there was the screening of the closing film already, the world première of Rémi Bezançon’s Le Crime du 3e Étage, to be released internationally as Murder in the Building. It’s a comedy crime thriller starring Gilles Lellouche and Laetitia Casta, and time did fly during the screening as well as people were having a lot of fun with it. In the film, we follow François and Colette. François writes adventure novels and Colette is a renowned expert on Hitchcock, giving lectures at the university about suspense in films. Their time together lacks spice though; François stays indoors in his pyjamas all the time, writing, while Colette daydreams…
Valerie Veatch directed the “mind-expanding, investigative essay” documentary.
Between 1987 (Three Bewildered People in the Night) and 2010 (Kaboom), queer filmmaker Gregg Araki wrote and directed 10 films, solidifying his status as a New Queer Cinema visionary with few, if any, peers (only arthouse favorites Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes belong in the conversation). Simply put, Araki was one of the exhilaratingly transgressive filmmakers working at the margins of indie filmmaking as the 20th century ended and the 21st century began. As months turned into years and years turned into decades, changing cinema-going habits and generational shifts (Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, etc.) led to a noticeable slowdown in Araki’s output as a filmmaker. Araki shifted to directing episodic television, only returning to feature-length filmmaking in 2014 with White Bird in a…
When we first meet Joe (Seth Rogen), a failed musician turned conservatory music instructor, in director Olivia Wilde’s (Don’t Worry Darling, Booksmart) superbly engaging third film, The Invite, he’s mired in a miasma of self-doubt, disappointment, and frustration. Indifferently releasing his students from practice, he embarks on the train and bike-rides home from the East Bay to San Francisco, the city where he lives, if not exactly thrives, as one-half of a floundering, forty-something couple with his longtime wife, Angela (Wilde). Together, they live in an impossibly spacious, cavernous apartment, the kind of San Francisco apartment acquirable only through wealth, usually of the tech kind, or inheritance. Joe falls in the latter category, having inherited his apartment from his late parents. A point…
The International Film Festival Rotterdam is host to many beginning directors, but that doesn’t mean there are no regular returning guests. Writer, director and actor Guillaume Nicloux has visited the festival several times, and this year he brought a treat with him: the world première of his new thriller Mi Amor, starring Pom Klementieff and Benoît Magimel. Klementieff plays Roxy, a DJ visiting the Canary Islands to play a gig at a nightclub. With her is her friend Chloé, and the two are having a much needed break from recent emotional turmoil in their lives. But after Roxy’s performance, Chloé is nowhere to be seen and the next day she does not return to the hotel. When Roxy goes to the police they do not…
Filmmaker David Lynch (Lost Highway, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet) may have left this mortal plane for the next, but his influence — not to mention his filmography — survives in the work of filmmakers who found a kindred spirit in Lynch and his singular, irreducible, unreproducible worldview. Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature-length film debut as a writer-director, Night Nurse, a psychosexually tinged neo-noir, doesn’t fall into “Lynchian” territory (blurred boundaries between the real and the unreal, the canny and the uncanny, dream logic escaping into the “real” world, among other characterizing features), but, at a minimum, it’s Lynchian-adjacent and, as such, will be of qualified interest for Lynch’s fans and filmgoers eager for original, novel filmmaking. Set in and around an upscale retirement…
Canada is far from the only country that has a tradition of lovingly mocking some of its stranger, often poor and delusional, white-trash subcultures (I am looking at you Australia, New Zealand and Britain). However, the Canadian flavour often takes the form of a road movie or a faux- documentary, or both. For half a century, every decade there is a breakout of this very specific “Hoser-Genre” of cinema emerges: Don Shebib’s indisputable 1970 classic Goin’ Down the Road, In the 1980s Bob and Doug Mackenzie got a feature film blow up (Strange Brew) that turned their ubiquitously quotable SCTV sketches into a cult classic. The 1990s saw Bruce MacDonald’s punk rock tour gone off the rails into comic surrealism with Hard Core Logo. In the…
Plus: Luc Besson’s ‘Dracula’ and Renny Harlin’s ‘The Strangers: Chapter 3.’