Film

After The Storm is a moving, yet unsentimental portrayal of inter-generational relationships, fraught family dynamics, and the fragility of the human condition. Part time father Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) spends his limited income on gambling, instead of child maintenance, and longs to rekindle the love lost when his ex-wife (Yoko Make) divorced him. His tiny one-room apartment wall may be filled with post-it notes of ideas, but his glory days as a successful author are long gone, and his job as...

Setting a film in an orphanage, one expects a tale filled with suffering. My Life As A Courgette is a creative accomplishment, managing to be heartwarming and light, even when it’s touching upon the dark subject matter of childhood pain and abandonment. This beautifully animated film is based on a novel by French writer Gilles Paris, and director Claude Barras and screenwriter Céline Sciamma have skilfully managed to create a tender coming of age story, where the loss and abuse...

By Michael McNulty Location, location, location! Here are five films in which the city plays an integral part. 25th Hour – New York City, New York Monty Brogan, a midlevel drug dealer, spends his final hours before beginning a seven year prison sentence for possession and dealing, with his with his girlfriend and friends. This is as much a film about loyalty, betrayal, missed opportunity and consequences as it is a film about New York. New York is familiar territory...

By Michael McNulty John Goldschmidt’s Dough, penned by first time scriptwriters Jonathon Benson and Jez Freedman, feels like an afterschool special that’s trying to take on too much. Race, religion, culture and age, the differences, the divisions, the need to look past them all and come together is what this film is all about, with a “save the shop” thread running through the middle. Nat (Jonathan Pryce), an aging Jewish baker, with a dwindling customer base runs the risk of...

By Linda Marric Directed by Xiaogang Feng and staring Chinese superstar Feng Xiaogang, I am Not Madam Bovary is a film like no other film you’ve seen before. This beautifully crafted and unusually shot film is everything you’d want from a social commentary film. It touches on themes ranging from female empowerment, bureaucracy and state corruption, and it does this with a huge amount of humour and clever subtext. Shot partly in a circular frame, the film isn’t just technically...

By Linda Marric What more is there to be said about The Beatles that hasn’t already been said before. In It Was 50 Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper and Beyond, which by all accounts has the clunkiest title for a documentary you could ever think of, director Alan G. Parker offers a rather disappointing, overly long, and altogether messy account of the band during the making of the eponymous album. The film also offers a look behind the...

By Michael McNulty Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour, released in 1967, took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stands in film history as one of the most, if not the most, erotic films of all time. Based on Joseph Kessel’s, a Russian who lived in Argentina and wrote in French, novel of the same name, Belle de Jour may not seem as salacious now as when it first appeared, both in print and on the silver...

By Linda Marric Considered by many as one of the most talented animators working in Europe at the moment, Michael Dudok de Wit hit the jackpot when he was approached out of the blue by Studio Ghibli to make a film with them. The result was one of the best received films at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and went on to win praise as well as prizes around the world. The Red Turtle came out of nowhere to steal...

The Other Side of Hope concerns itself with the struggles of two contrasting men who have both left their homes. One is Khlaed (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki via a dozen other European countries and who hopes to have finally found a new home. The other is Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), who leaves his alcoholic wife and life as a shirt salesman, and is soon seen risking his life savings in a poker game. After winning...