Author Carmen Paddock

For a film set in motion by a death, Dafne bursts with life. The titular heroine (Carolina Raspanti) suddenly loses her mother in the film’s opening minutes – the accident is never fully explained, but...

Sometimes, a film entrances so entirely that its plot matters little. This is the case with Turkish drama A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler), which follows its three headstrong heroines as each return...

Documentaries are meant to show facts objectively, but when the narrative style loses personal accounts in its passivity viewer engagement is tested, if not abandoned entirely. Kameni Govornici (The Stone...

Agnieszka Holland’s account of the man who exposed Stalin’s Ukrainian famine is a straightforward account whose tone occasionally jars with genre touches – these dynamic choices would work better if...

Gentrification is the enemy in Bait, Mark Jenkin’s black and white drama set on Cornwall’s fishing coast and the UK’s only entry to the Berlinale’s Forum programme this year. The philosophical and...

A film which opens with a closeup on its subject’s privates will not be to everyone’s taste. It is hard to separate the pornography throughout The Blue Flower of Novalis (A rosa azul de Novalis) from its...

There are touches of Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Assassination Nation in the decayed suburbia that defines Jennifer Reeder’s quasi-surrealist exploration of communal trauma. Knives and Skins paints a...

There are several anecdotes, lines, and dramatic turning points in Norwegian-Swedish drama Out Stealing Horses (Ut og stjæle hester) that seem to be the emotional crux of the picture. Until the closing...

Austrian drama The Ground Beneath My Feet (Der Boden unter den Füßen) explores the cracks in a meticulously constructed life that does not go to plan. Lola’s actions in the face of a ruthless corporate...

If Wind River were crossed with Love With the Proper Stranger, the result would be something akin to Öndög, Wang Quan’an’s gorgeous, meditative police drama turned romantic comedy based on real events....

Were it not for the closing credits, it would be easy to mistake La Arrancada for fiction instead of fact. Set in modern day Cuba, it follows Jenniffer – an aspiring professional athlete – as an injury...

People rarely wish to be defined by their teenage years; in his fourth feature film Fourteen, Dan Sallitt continues his exploration of tight-knit relationships with a friendship anchored in a middle-school...

Early in Renaud Barret’s documentary, one of his profiled artists observes that the act of living in Kinshasa is creating art in itself. Système K provides a fearless platform through which the street...

If looking for compelling explorations of authorship and the merits of varying artistic mediums, The Plagiarists is not the place to come. Any redeeming qualities are lost under a heavily contrived plot...

In her multi award-winning script, Nora Fingscheidt deals with the unromantic realities of finding foster children a home, creating a film that does not flinch from emotional or physical violence and the...