Fatima meditates on language barriers and what it takes to become French.
Film Reviews
Here you will find every film review we've written. These include: festival films, new releases, and older films.
The politics of sisterhood in Mustang
Mustang, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s directorial debut, charts five sisters’ resistance, as they both grow into and reject a narrow notion of womanhood. But Ergüven privileges perspectives that a Western audience can understand and approve of, making the story too familiar and incomplete.
Being 17 is more Sciamma’s than Techiné’s film
Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic reviews Being 17. Although it was written by Céline Sciamma and directed by André Techiné, it’s got Sciamma’s fingerprints all over it.
The Lovers and the Despot lacks substance
The Lovers and the Despot tells what should be an interesting story without doing the work to create one. It recounts a bizarre slice of South Korean cinema history: in 1978, director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped, separately, by Kim Jung-II from Hong Kong and held for eight years. Kim Jung-Il wanted swift improvements in the North Korean film industry, and this was his solution.
Notes on Blindness explores the soundscape
Documentarians Peter Middleton and James Spinney use segments of John M. Hull’s actual audio tape recordings to reconstruct his experience of going blind in this experimental non-fiction film.
Things to Come is a less damning portrait of misfortune than Eden
Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic examines how Mia Hansen-Løve’s last two films, Eden and L’Avenir (Things to Come), reverse-engineer seemingly cliched stories in order to find the emotional truth and realism buried within them.