Beasts Clawing at Straws – Review Nick Davie December 16, 2020 Reviews Kim Yong-hoon’s debut feature Beasts Clawing at Straws is a darkly comic thriller that is befitting of post-Parasite South Korean cinema. This smart neo-noir is a slow burner that catalogues the...
The Kiosk – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie July 9, 2020 Reviews An overarching theme of this film may be the media publishing industry as a whole, but it is essentially an intimate observation of the press trade at its roots: the newspaper kiosk. In a wealthy area of...
The Filmmaker’s House – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie July 9, 2020 Reviews Part-documentary, part-fiction, Marc Isaacs invites audiences into his home, in this overtly invasive and introspective examination of life in controlled spaces. A foreboding uneasy sensation is shared amongst...
Aswang – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 30, 2020 Reviews Alyx Ayn Arumpac assesses the Filipino government’s war on drugs, in this pivotal and terrifying examination of the impact on life in the region. When Rodrigo Duterte is voted in as the president of the...
Southern Journey (Revisited) – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 28, 2020 Reviews British filmmakers Tim Plester and Rob Currie retrace the steps made in 1959 by Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist who charted folk music in the South of the United States. This road movie and music...
The Metamorphosis of Birds – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 28, 2020 Reviews The transcendent debut from Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos partly looks back at how Beatriz meets Henrique, and subsequently marry on Beatriz’s 21st birthday. Henrique is often away, serving as a...
Corporate Accountability – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 27, 2020 Reviews Jonathan Perel’s audiovisual quandary is a film essay dissecting the relationship between industry and the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Perel documents a present haunting absence of humanity in...
The Go-Go’s – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 21, 2020 Reviews From the punk scene in L.A. to Broadway musical, this documentary is a deserved and welcomed portrait chronicling seminal all-female band The Go-Go’s rise, fall, and eventual reunion. America’s first, and...
Brigitte – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Nick Davie June 14, 2020 Reviews Lynne Ramsay’s latest work is a short documentary film, showing at Sheffield Doc/Fest, capturing a detailed and intimate conversation with photographer Brigitte Lacombe. French photographer Lacombe is a...
Days of the Bagnold Summer – Review Nick Davie June 10, 2020 Reviews This bittersweet debut feature from The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird is a mature and poignant tale of family struggles. Based on Joff Winterhart’s 2012 graphic novel of the same name, this particular family,...
Citizen Kane – My First Time Film Review Nick Davie May 26, 2020 Reviews In this new series of articles, our writers are watching classic films for the first time. This time we have Nick Davie catching up on the classic 1941 Orson Welles epic Citizen Kane. The seminal...
Céline Sciamma, Water Lilies, and the Complications of Youthful Desire Nick Davie May 11, 2020 Analysis, Close-Up, Features Céline Sciamma is having a moment. Following the 2019 festival debut and this year's cinematic release ofPortrait of a Lady on Fire, she is currently the subject of Mubi UK's 'Focus on' retrospective. This...