Tony McKibbin

Seminal Souls - Antonioni and Bergman in the 21st century

A look at the significance of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman

26 Apr 2012

Dying within twenty four hours of each other, the demise of two great filmmakers in 2007 was clearly a loss, but though Ingmar Bergman came out of retirement to make Saraband in 2002, and Antonioni made one feature, Beyond the Clouds (and a later short…

Bombay Beach

Half real, half dream-like American documentary from director Alma Har'el

23 Jan 2012

(Cert tbc) 80min There was a time when documentary at least generally gave the impression of being a medium distinct from fiction, where various movements (Direct Cinema, cinema verité) put their faith in the relative objectivity of the image, as…

The music and film collaborations of Tindersticks and Claire Denis

The creative partnership between the French director and the UK band

21 Oct 2011

Just as there are actors directors consistently work with, and where the French have a term called the acteur/actrice fétiche to define this affiliation, equally there are plenty filmmakers whose relationship with their composers seem equally…

Cutter's Way - Re-release of 1981 film starring Jeff Bridges

Study in decorum and ethos is a lost classic and 70s swan song

12 Oct 2011

In an early scene in 1981’s Cutter’s Way, the bronzed Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) gets out of bed and we see the ripple of a six-pack as his stomach hits the light. Shortly afterwards we see his old friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard), a Vietnam veteran…

Film Socialisme

Jean-Luc Godard tells story of Europe in decline

29 Jul 2011

(PG) 101min Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme is about as difficult a film as you’ll see this or any other year, but if some will conclude the film is unwatchable, it might be useful to say why that is so, why it may even be partly intentional on…

The Tree

Psychological drama starring Charlotte Gainsbourg is a fine study of loss

29 Jul 2011

(12A) 100min It seems trees are the new black: Terrence Malick wins the Palme d’Or with The Tree of Life, Win Win shows the central character’s life on track as he finally takes down the tree outside his garden, and La Quattro Volte gives a tree a…

Flesh Of The Orchid (La Chair De L’Orchidee)

12 Jan 2011

(18) 120min (Bluebell) Charlotte Rampling rarely takes an easy role and this 1975 adaptation of a James Hadley Chase novel is no exception. She is Claire, a runaway heiress and it’s the asylum she is running away from. Taking up with big and bulky…

Tropic of Cancer

14 Dec 2010

(18) 87min (Olive Films) Available on DVD for the first time, this is the 1970 adaptation of Henry Miller’s novel set at the end of the 1960s rather than the 1930s when the book was originally published. It nevertheless captures the irreverence of…

The Viva Cuba Collection

14 Dec 2010

(12) 680min (Network) Back in the 1960s there was mighty Cuban filmmaking wave. Filmmakers Tomás Guttiérez Alea and Humberto Solás became internationally significant filmmakers whilst reflecting the social values espoused by Castro’s government.

Room In Rome (Habitacion En Roma)

Julio Medem continues exploration of sexuality, but delivers emptiest film yet

22 Nov 2010

(18) 103min (Optimum) Two women, one gay, Alba (Elena Anaya), the other the heterosexual Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko) have an overnight fling in a Rome hotel room, talk about their pasts and prepare for their future. Director Julio Medem continues…

Lovely Rita

Jessica Hausner’s 2001 account of small town family life

22 Nov 2010

(15) 80min (Artificial Eye) Obviously less polished than her later work (Hotel, Lourdes), Jessica Hausner’s 2001 account of a teenager’s stultifying small town family life in Austria is easily reflected in the flat images, in the overly even and…

The Hunter

2 Nov 2010

(15) 92min After making a documentary about wild and crazy man of US cinema Abel Ferrara in 2003, Iranian filmmaker Rafi Pitts went on to make the spare and contained drama It’s Winter, a fable-like account of someone who goes off to find work and…

Hotel

Austrian drama brings out cold emptiness of a spiritless world

2 Nov 2010

(15) 74 min (Artificial Eye) Jessica Hausner shows the same eerie sense of place as she would show in her recent Lourdes, a gaze that makes simple details stand out in all their bland terror. As Irene (Franziska Weisz) takes a job as a desk clerk in…

An exploration of Hong Sang-soo's films ahead of Edinburgh Filmhouse season

Tony McKibbin examines the relationship dynamic in Korean filmmaker's celebrated films

28 Oct 2010

Hong Sangsoo films often focus on characters so in crisis that they cannot help but generate crises in the very situations they find themselves in. They are not only crisis-ridden; they create a mise-en-scene of misery out of their own inability to…

Take One Action film festival showcases best in political cinema

Budrus, Nero’s Guests and Sweet Crude among highlights of 2010

23 Sep 2010

Take One Action! should have enough films in their 2010 programme to get the most politically slothful citizen socially activated. The film Budrus focuses on small actions leading to big results, with villagers in the little titular town taking things…

Take One Action Film Festival 2010

Sweet Crude, Climate Refugees and Budrus among highlights

22 Sep 2010

Now in its third year, the Take One Action! Film Festival offers a rare opportunity to watch activist documentaries and politically-orientated films at the cinema. This excellent festival concentrates on the agenda-setting and eco-documentary sub-genres…

Julia Bacha's Budrus screens at Take One Action Film Festival

Middle East documentary

22 Sep 2010

Name Julia Bacha Born Rio de Janeiro, 1980. Background Bacha studied Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University. She worked as co-writer and editor on the 2004 multi award-winning documentary about Al Jazeera, Control Room…

Enter The Void

17 Sep 2010

(18) 142min Argentine/French filmmaker Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone, Irreversible) has proven both his amazing vision and his impoverished sensibility with his past forays into feature filmmaking. His latest is a metaphysical movie offered from the…

The Faber Book of New South American Cinema - Demetrios Matheou

1 Sep 2010

“This book is very much concerned with personal filmmaking”, Demetrios Matheou insists in the introduction to New South American Cinema, a book of interviews with various filmmakers from the region. But South American film seems as close to the Korean…

The 7th Dimension

24 Aug 2010

(15) 90min (Kaleidoscope) ‘The whole universe in one room,’ a character pronounces in Brad Watson’s low budget sci-fi. Clearly envisaged as the kind of cerebral sci-fi thriller that makes up for its lack of economic clout with ingenuity of thought…

The Mother of Invention

24 Aug 2010

(12) 98min (Kaleidoscope) Despite an amusing cameo by Mark Boone Jr as protagonist Vincent’s dishevelled dad and a couple of wryly amusing moments from Kevin Corrigan playing Vincent’s relatively wise, melancholic buddy, this is a mockumentary…

Pornography: A Thriller

One porn actor investigates the disappearance of another

17 Aug 2010

What happened to famous gay porn star Mark Anton? Did he end up in a snuff film? Another porn actor intent on turning movie director investigates. David Kittredge’s film may sell itself as Cronenberg meets Lynch, but the comparisons do him no…

The Dinner Party

Australian psychological drama by Scott Murden

12 Aug 2010

(15) 88min (Kaleidoscope) Opening with the claim that it was inspired by real events, this Australian psychological drama by Scott Murden manages to drain the plausibility out of its subject by flatly delivered, moralising dialogue, clumsy character…

In The Pit

Documentary explores lives of Mexico City labourers

23 Jul 2010

(E) 84min (Network) Exploring the thoughts, feelings and labour activity of workers in Mexico City who are employed in building a new second-deck motorway around the capital, Juan Carlos Rulfo’s film manages to give individuality to a handful of…

The Island

Well-told Russian fable of spirituality and guilt

23 Jul 2010

(PG) 150min (Artificial Eye) The spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky hovers over Russian cinema maybe more than any other director, perhaps quite aptly for one so given to the spiritual himself. The Island opens with a horrible moment of human weakness.

Claire Denis retrospective includes White Material, Beau Travail and Chocolat

8 Jul 2010

Claire Denis is one of the most significant figures of contemporary world cinema. To coincide with the Edinburgh Filmhouse season of here films currently screening, film writer Tony McKibbin offers an analysis of the French film-maker's body of work.

Don’t Look Now - Ed. Paul Newland

16 Jun 2010

(Intellect Press) Don’t Look Now is a work of low-key persuasion; it wants to convince us that seventies British cinema wasn’t an aesthetic dire strait, but a forking path of numerous possibilities. The decade may have given us film versions of On…

The Vital Life - Agnès Varda Retrospective

9 Jun 2010

Agnès Varda, now eighty two, is a great vitalist but hardly a facile optimist. Her films are infused with the importance of life, but death frequently hovers over her work. In Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), at the beginning of the film a fortune teller…

The Essential Claude Chabrol

28 May 2010

(15) 299min (Artificial Eye) Few filmmakers deserve an essential collection more than Chabrol, but this is not that. His broad and long career trails from fine early films (Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins) through to the late 1960s peak period (Le…

The Best Intentions

28 May 2010

(12) 181min (Park Circus) The Best Intentions has pedigree galore. Based on a memoir of his parent’s unhappy marriage, it’s scripted by Ingmar Bergman and directed by feted Danish filmmaker Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror, The House of the…

Before I Forget (Avant Que J’Oublie)

28 Apr 2010

(15) 108min (Peccadillo) In this episodic account of an aging homosexual’s life in Paris, writer and director Jacques Nolot takes the leading role of writer Pierre in a film that looks at the alternative networks of communication. Roles here would…

The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film - Laura Rascaroli

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) The Personal Camera is an engaging, sometimes illuminating and well-grounded look at basically what people have for years now been calling the essay film. “The object of study of this book is sited at the intersection of documentary, art…

Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre - James Kendrick

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) James Kendrick’s short volume isn’t at all an ambitious book; and that is perhaps as much down to the nature of the commission as it is to the limitations of the writer. This is one of Wallflower publishing’s Short Cuts. The books are…

The International Film Guide - Ed. Ian Haydn Smith

16 Apr 2010

(Wallflower) The International Film Guide is an institution. An important annual detailing the events of world cinema, nation by nation, it is the place to go to find info about the state of the film industry everywhere, including Egypt, Cuba…

The Shinjuku Incident (San Suk Si Gin)

29 Mar 2010

(18) 120min (Cine Asia) Hundreds of Chinese refugees wash up on the shores of Japan hoping for a better life, and none more so than Steelhead (Jackie Chan), who hasn’t only come for work but also to find a childhood sweetheart Xiu (Xu Jinglei).

Adoration

2 Mar 2010

(15) 101min With its stilted dialogue and contrived plot revelations, this 2008 film by French Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (the first of two films by Egoyan released in Scotland this fortnight) would seem to indicate a filmmaker who has lost his…

The Fox Family

1 Feb 2010

(15) 102min (Terracotta) Manic Korean tale about a family of shape-shifting ‘kumiho’ (literally a nine-tailed fox) spirits hiding out with a circus troupe as they prepare to become human beings permanently. The chance occurs only once every thousand…

Beast Stalker

15 Jan 2010

(15) 110min (CineAsia) Dante Lam’s Hong Kong action thriller is one of those impressive genre works where the plot hurtles along but the emotional bits are on go-slow, with heavy-handed bits of sentimentsitting uneasily alongside commendably…

Greek Pete

15 Jan 2010

(18) 75min (Peccadillo) Pete (Peter Pittaros) is a young man on the make, a hustler with a nine inch appendage and a telephone patter that gets the customers banging on his Covent Garden flat door. Andrew Haigh’s film is half documentary, half…

The Other Man

5 Jan 2010

(15) 84 min (Metrodome) Whatever Richard Eyre’s importance as a theatre director, working on plays by Hare, Griffith and Brenton, his recent cinema work (Iris, Notes on a Scandal) has sometimes struggled for significance. This adaptation of Bernhard…

Under The Mud

5 Jan 2010

(12A) 86 min (Hurricane Films) Of Time and the City producer Sol Papadopoulos’ well-intentioned and warm-hearted modern Liverpool fable is a bit like a cross between Peter Mullan’s Orphans, and an episode of late lamented soap Brookside. Liverpool…

The Last Thakur

4 Dec 2009

(15) 83min (Artificial Eye) This Bangladeshi Western directed by British filmmaker Sadik Ahmed is a clumsily realised tale of Oedipal tensions. The film focuses on Kala, a young man visiting a small town determined to find out who raped his mother.

Jacques Tati - The Height of Comic Discretion

Retrospective part of French Film Festival 2009

4 Nov 2009

Nobody put it better than the French critic André Bazin when describing Jacques Tati thus: “he himself seems unfinished; one might speak of his ‘discretion of being’”. Born in 1907, Tati was certainly educationally incomplete. David Bellos in his…

Leon: The Director's Cut

4 Nov 2009

(15) 133min (Optimum DVD retail) Luc Besson adds 24 minutes of material removed from the original release for this re-release of his commercially successful 1995 film about hired assassin Leon’s initially reluctant and finally euphoric relationship…

Welcome

30 Oct 2009

(15) 104min Writer and director Philippe Lioret’s film expounds on the difficulties of immigrants and casual racism in modern day Calais. Seventeen-year-old Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) is looking to make it to London. He has already walked thousands of…

Secret Defense

Menace in every moment

22 Oct 2009

Veteran New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient, La Belle Noiseuse, Celine and Julie Go Boating) explores the sins of the past. Rivette regular Sandrine Bonnaire plays Parisian research scientist Sylvie Rousseau. When her brother shows…

Take One Action! Film Festival

15 Sep 2009

Anybody who has a poster of Theo Angelopolous’s The Weeping Meadow up on his wall is unlikely to ignore the aesthetics of film. But Take One Action organiser Simon Bateson also wants “to get bums off seats as well”. He wants the viewer watching various…

Dynamic: 01 - The Best of DavidLynch.com

11 Sep 2009

(15) 116 min (Scanbox DVD retail) Watching these sketches and skits that were first shown on David Lynch’s subscription-based website, we might think he is the Francis Bacon of film. In his features Lynch is the master of the tension between…

Nagisa Oshima retrospective at Edinburgh Filmhouse

The Pensive Provocateur

2 Sep 2009

A complex figure making sense of a complex, still defeated post-war Japanese society, Nagisa Oshima’s career coincided with the French Nouvelle Vague, and he has proved over the years as provocative a filmmaker as any that came out of France at the end…

God Man Dog

23 Aug 2009

(15) 119min (Terracotta Media DVD retail) Now that the multi-strand story is so prominent, we tend to forget that the fine Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang was influential in developing its form with his mid-1980s film Terroriser. Compatriot Singing…