One slightly unexpected effect of all the travel I’ve been doing recently is that I get a real, visceral sense of place from some slightly surprising places when I see them on the big screen. Having an idea of how the place really is, how people behave, how the air feels, how the food tastes, [...]
The Edinburgh Film Festival finished a couple of weeks ago. As ever, I went along and saw a bunch of films and stage interviews. The programme had been a little disappointing, mostly due to feeling a little constricted – some things that are usually present were dropped (Mirrorball being the most obvious example) and the [...]
One of my recent DVD acquisitions was Festen, the first of the Dogma 95 films. In spite of not having seen the film since it came out more than a decade ago (though I did re-watch it once then after first seeing it at the EIFF) it’s been one of the films I think back [...]
It’s been so long since the film festival that I keep on forgetting half the good films I saw there when talking to people about it, so for the record here’s a brief list of my personal highlights: Encounters at the End of the World: Werner Hertzog goes to Antarctica, making a film more about [...]
One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly [...]
One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people. Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is a documentary about the Mardi Gras celebrations [...]
I saw Wong Kar Wai’s new film My Blueberry Nights a week or two back. It has had fairly poor reviews, mostly criticising the film for being insubstantial but pretty. This is fair comment but the reviews seem much harsher than is deserved – the film really is gorgeous and it never felt like it [...]
I’ve not written up anything from the film festival properly as I meant to and at this rate I’ll never get round to it so here goes… It was a good year for fun late night movies, Teeth especially. It’s a very simple idea and they’ve hit it bang on; it’s hard to add anything [...]
It’s new year’s eve in Los Angeles; Wilson and Vivian have met as a result of a craigslist advert posted earlier in the day. He’s had a terrible year – his attempts to pursue his dreams started to go wrong before he even reached the city – and as we find out during the film [...]
Usually seeing a film at the film festival means seeing it in the most favorable circumstances – all the technical stuff will usually be done well, sometimes the filmmakers will often be there to talk about the film and there is usually a large, appreciative audience which helps the atmosphere no end. Unfortunately that doesn’t [...]