Tagged LFF 18

Capernaum was an ancient city in what is now northern Israel on the sea of Galilee, thought to be the setting for a string of Jesus’ miraculous feats of healing. No such easy fixes come for those who...

How do you make art didactic? And, if you can, can it prevent history from repeating itself? Radu Jude's "I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians" tackles these questions alongside a heavier task:...

Truth is a fickle concept at the best of times, but during a war sponsored by one of the world’s greatest purveyors of Fake News, the very notions of facts and rationality go flying out the window. This is...

Most of us will one day be made to face our own mediocrity, contend with the fact we’re only ordinary, and find ways to fit into a world where we are merely spectators to more powerful, exceptional...

A fair few films have used the narrative trick of blurring reality and fiction, but almost none of them have done it as confusingly and pointlessly as Touch Me Not. A perverse and neurotic study of intimacy,...

"We are all stardust" is the shiny, pseudo-metaphysical mantra of Carol Morley's Out of Blue, a phrase rendered meaningless when tacked onto this crime drama. The cosmos, dark matter, stardust, and parallel...

You know the dude in Starbucks, the one with the thick-rimmed glasses, chequered shirt and a macchiato who’s forever working on his screenplay? Well, Life Itself is that very screenplay, and somehow it’s...

The Wild Pear Tree is not a film you can watch or recommend casually. Like all Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work, it’s enormously long, serious, and dense with dialogue, requiring over three hours of concentration...

Returned to the world after four months under ISIS captivity, war reporter Gabriel (Roman Kolinka) comes back to Paris a man transformed and ill at ease with the haunting familiarities and the discomfiting...

Though David Lowery's A Ghost Story and his new The Old Man & the Gun are wholly different films, Lowery has returned to an exploration of what he began in the first: our time on Earth and how we spend...

An easy way to raise a film’s stakes is to put an infant or pet in harm's way. What impresses most in Matteo Garrone’s Dogman is that it manages to take the crown of 2018’s most stressful film while...

Most of us have relatives we hardly remember – an aunt, cousin or grandparent dead before we were born or when we were too young to form lasting memories. And although an impression is made, their memory...

Journalist David Sheff and his son Nic exist on opposite ends of a spectrum; at once, they balance out a complete picture while repelling and aggravating each other in equal measure. Belgian director Felix...

Loosely adapted from Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead trades Roman politicking and murder for a disastrous family party where everyone is yelling and no one is listening. It might...

Ali Abbasi’s Border is a strange breed of film, much like its protagonist, Tina (Eva Melander) – a border control officer with a bizarre ability to smell illegal activity. Abbasi reimagines a short story...