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‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Review: A Spiritual Wander Through Rural Vietnam Makes For a Transfixing Debut - variety.com - Vietnam
variety.com
25.05.2023

‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Review: A Spiritual Wander Through Rural Vietnam Makes For a Transfixing Debut

Guy Lodge Film Critic All of life, including death, is in the lengthy, unbroken shot that opens Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” We begin on the sidelines of a local soccer match in Saigon’s city center, observing the play from a cool distance before following a shuffling mascot, dressed in a wolf suit, to the adjoining bar. There, crowds watch a 2018 World Cup fixture while a group of young men, turned from the TV, drink and discuss matters of faith, existence and ennui. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is quiet and morose, only half-invested in a conversation already beset with distractions: the sales pitch of a bubbly beer rep, the burst of a sudden summer thunderstorm, a metallic screech and grim thump as the camera again drifts serenely over to reveal the aftermath of a fatal motorcycle crash. In the ensuing rhubarb of bystander concern, Thien stays put.

‘Kennedy’ Review: Anurag Kashyap’s Rogue-Cop Saga Twists and Turns but Never Fully Grabs - variety.com - India
variety.com
25.05.2023

‘Kennedy’ Review: Anurag Kashyap’s Rogue-Cop Saga Twists and Turns but Never Fully Grabs

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s 11 years since Anurag Kashyap’s electrifying five-hour crime opus “Gangs of Wasseypur” jolted Cannes audiences, triggering renewed global interest in Indian genre cinema and vaulting Kashyap to auteur status with several subsequent films granted A-list festival premiere status — even if none quite matched his breakout feature for ambition or execution. Following a run of lower-profile potboilers in a range of genres that saw him through the pandemic era, Kashyap’s elaborately conceived, brashly violent policier “Kennedy” aims to return him to the art-pulp elite, starting with an obliging premiere slot in Cannes’ Midnight section. The result is a declarative but somewhat disappointing return to underworld territory. Enlivened by some propulsive action, a hip-hop-inflected song score and a combative streak of anti-institutional protest — in a COVID-era context that proves one of the script’s more interesting specifics — “Kennedy” is ultimately weighed down by hit-or-miss performances and convoluted plotting that isn’t always ahead of its own twists. Internationally, the film is likely too lurid for crossover arthouse interest, though it would be a good fit for major streaming platforms.

‘The Pot au Feu’ Review: Tràn Anh Hùng’s Gorgeous Gastromance Stays at a Slow Simmer With Lusciously Tender Results - variety.com - France - Vietnam
variety.com
24.05.2023

‘The Pot au Feu’ Review: Tràn Anh Hùng’s Gorgeous Gastromance Stays at a Slow Simmer With Lusciously Tender Results

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave. She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house. This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia. There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.

‘Hounds’ Review: A Kidnapping Job Goes to the Dogs in a Lively Moroccan Debut - variety.com - Morocco
variety.com
23.05.2023

‘Hounds’ Review: A Kidnapping Job Goes to the Dogs in a Lively Moroccan Debut

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the mean streets of Casablanca dartingly navigated in “Hounds,” all life is shown to be casually disposable; an actual human body, however, is another matter. Taking place over one sleepless night of mounting misfortune in the Moroccan metropolis, writer-director Kamal Lazraq’s first feature is a trim, unsparing crime tale that pits social desperation against a nagging spiritual conscience. Its gig-economy gangsters may follow almost any grisly orders for a quick buck, but are equally bound to Muslim creeds and customs, glumly shrugging off any disparity between these two authorities. Following an impoverished father-son duo as an ostensibly rote criminal errand goes bloodily awry, the film is briskly told and humidly atmospheric, though a little tonal variation wouldn’t have gone amiss amid an overriding air of hardscrabble, stomach-knotted discomfort. As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place — and just enough genre-film vigor to hook distributor interest after its Un Certain Regard premiere at Cannes.

‘How to Have Sex’ Review: Molly Manning Walker’s Debut Makes a Hot Neon Splash Before Turning Chillingly Dark - variety.com - Britain - USA - county Wells - Charlotte, county Wells
variety.com
20.05.2023

‘How to Have Sex’ Review: Molly Manning Walker’s Debut Makes a Hot Neon Splash Before Turning Chillingly Dark

Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone seeking to describe “How to Have Sex” for potential American viewers is liable to land on the term “spring break” in the process: It is, after all, a story about hard-partying teenagers heading to a sunny coastal resort for several nights of boozy, horny, wholly unsupervised antics. Yet the teens here are British, the destination one of those grisly Mediterranean club hubs geared entirely toward British tourists, and the partying so distinctly British in its aims and etiquette that the translation hardly applies. The vacation presented here is as much like a quintessential spring break as Molly Manning Walker’s fresh, head-turning debut debut feature is like Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” — superficially similar in its pile-driving social chaos and eye-searing fluorescent visuals, but with a very different, damaged heart beating underneath it all.

‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett Returns to Australia For an Eerie, Atmospheric Clash of Faiths - variety.com - Australia - city Warwick - Beyond
variety.com
19.05.2023

‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett Returns to Australia For an Eerie, Atmospheric Clash of Faiths

Guy Lodge Film Critic The new boy doesn’t get a name, and he doesn’t give one. Arriving at an isolated orphanage in rural South Australia in the early 1940s, he’s taken in with brisk kindness by the two nuns who oversee the place, but privileges like names are for children a little further along in their understanding and acceptance of this establishment’s firm Christian principles: Until he’s ready for baptism, the shirtless, mostly wordless Aboriginal newcomer will be acknowledged but not identified. It’s a limbo state that evocatively represents the tension between Australia’s Indigenous population and even the most notionally inclusive of their colonizers; in Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable “The New Boy,” spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.

‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Paints the Minutiae of Misanthropy on a Vast, Ravishing Canvas - variety.com - Turkey
variety.com
19.05.2023

‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Paints the Minutiae of Misanthropy on a Vast, Ravishing Canvas

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Does everyone have to be a hero?” The question comes from thirtysomething art teacher Samet (Deni̇z Celi̇loğlu), burst out in frustration in the heat of an intense argument with his fellow educator and would-be girlfriend Nuray (Merve Di̇zdar), as they disagree over just how, or how much, any individual is obliged to contribute to society. It’s a familiar cry from a male protagonist in a film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even if it hasn’t ever been worded quite so directly: “About Dry Grasses,” his long, languid but slowly captivating ninth feature, is merely his latest work to examine man’s right, for better or worse, to be selfish, to be an anti-hero, to crave attention and isolation all at once, and to talk about it all night long.

‘Homecoming’ Review: Catherine Corsini’s Engrossing Study of a Family Evading a Past That Eventually Divides Them - variety.com - France
variety.com
17.05.2023

‘Homecoming’ Review: Catherine Corsini’s Engrossing Study of a Family Evading a Past That Eventually Divides Them

Guy Lodge Film Critic The story template of “Homecoming” is a standard one: Years after an unexplained trauma, a family returns to the place they once called home, where hidden truths come to light and bitter conflicts arise over the course of one seemingly idyllic summer. Yet for all the secrets and lies that shape the narrative of Catherine Corsini’s straightforwardly told but consistently intriguing new film, its most interesting tensions often emerge from things its characters already know, even if they haven’t acknowledged them out loud. For Black single parent Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna), arriving at the Corsican birthplace of her children after 15 years away, disinterring a buried past throws her maternal insecurities into sharp relief; for her teenage daughters Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and Farah (Esther Gohourou), what revelations the trip yields only underline their respective senses of not-belonging in their own small family.

‘The Goldman Case’ Review: Enthralling Courtroom Drama Navigates the Contradictions of a Left-Wing Outlaw - variety.com - France
variety.com
17.05.2023

‘The Goldman Case’ Review: Enthralling Courtroom Drama Navigates the Contradictions of a Left-Wing Outlaw

Guy Lodge Film Critic Appealing a conviction for two murders he insists he didn’t commit — while candidly, even proudly, admitting to multiple armed robbery charges — French activist turned criminal Pierre Goldman refuses to call any witnesses in his defense. “I’m innocent because I’m innocent,” he says flatly, rejecting the idea that testaments to his character and conduct have anything to do with it, and professing himself “disgusted” by courtroom pomp and theatricality. Except Goldman knows the power of fiery rhetorical speechifying when it suits him: In “The Goldman Case,” Cédric Kahn’s formally restrained but ultimately electrifying dramatization of a trial that gripped and divided France in 1976, that canny inconsistency is but one unexpected fold in a courtroom drama that finds equal intrigue in legal order and human chaos.

CAA Signs ‘Scrapper’ Filmmaker Charlotte Regan (EXCLUSIVE) - variety.com - Britain - London - county Harris - county Campbell - city Dickinson, county Harris - county Dickinson
variety.com
11.05.2023

CAA Signs ‘Scrapper’ Filmmaker Charlotte Regan (EXCLUSIVE)

Angelique Jackson CAA has signed filmmaker Charlotte Regan for representation. Regan made her feature debut with “Scrapper,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, winning the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. The Londoner wrote and directed the film, starring Harris Dickinson and newcomers Lola Campbell and Alin Uzun. “Scrapper” follows Georgie (Campbell), a dreamy 12-year-old girl who lives happily alone in her London flat, filling it with magic. Suddenly, her estranged father (Dickinson) turns up and forces her to confront reality. In Variety’s review, film critic Guy Lodge described the dramedy as a “sweet, pastel-colored spin on British realism.” He wrote: “Tracking the gradual but inevitable thawing of relations between Georgie and the estranged father who breezes back into her life, Regan’s debut rehashes a host of familiar elements from assorted kitchen-sink dramas and dysfunctional parent-child stories, painting them colorfully enough that audiences won’t mind the odd bit of rust.”

Film Movement Nabs North American Rights to ‘20,000 Species of Bees,’ About a Young Girl Who Begins Gender Transition (EXCLUSIVE) - variety.com - Spain - New York - USA - Berlin
variety.com
04.05.2023

Film Movement Nabs North American Rights to ‘20,000 Species of Bees,’ About a Young Girl Who Begins Gender Transition (EXCLUSIVE)

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Film Movement has acquired North American rights to Spanish writer-director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees,” a tender drama about growing up trans that recently won a Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear. The New York-based distributor is planning to roll out this topical title — in which the child protagonist explores her gender identity — in U.S. theaters in late 2023, followed by a wide release on all leading home entertainment and digital platforms. The announcement was made by Film Movement president Michael Rosenberg and Jennyfer Gautier, the head of international sales of Paris-based distributor Luxbox.

‘Twice Colonized’ Review: An Indigenous Activist Defends Her People’s Rights While Tending to Personal Wounds - variety.com - Canada - Denmark - Greenland
variety.com
28.04.2023

‘Twice Colonized’ Review: An Indigenous Activist Defends Her People’s Rights While Tending to Personal Wounds

Guy Lodge Film Critic An unusual credit appears at the beginning of “Twice Colonized,” Lin Alluna’s candid documentary portrait of Greenlandic lawyer and activist Aaju Peter, and it belongs to the film’s subject-star herself. “Lived by Aaju Peter” runs the text, and while that phrasing might initially seem a cute quirk, it proves fitting enough as Alluna’s camera follows her for seven years: In that time, Peter has an awful lot of difficult living to do, as she navigates personal tragedy and domestic abuse while making a name for herself as an outspoken campaigner for the rights of her fellow Inuit and other Indigenous people. “Twice Colonized” doesn’t treat her personal life as a background to her professional one, or vice versa. Rather, the film holds both narratives in balance, each informing the other, and both equally essential to understanding this defiantly singular woman.

‘Carmen’ Review: Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera Lead an Update of the Old Spanish Tragedy That Has Plenty of Fire But No Real Heat - variety.com - Spain - France - Mexico
variety.com
21.04.2023

‘Carmen’ Review: Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera Lead an Update of the Old Spanish Tragedy That Has Plenty of Fire But No Real Heat

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Carmen” didn’t begin life as an opera: French Romantic writer Prosper Mérimée conceived this tale of Spanish passion and tragic jealousy in 1845, thirty years before his compatriot Georges Bizet brought it into its best-known, aria-rich form. But it’s a story that thrives on operatic delivery, hinging on emotions so large and loud they beg to be sung at the top of one’s lungs. That makes it the opera that filmmakers can’t leave alone, even as they tend to switch out the music: Its screen interpretations range from Otto Preminger’s Broadway-rooted “Carmen Jones” to Jean-Luc Godard’s daring, Beethoven-infused “First Name: Carmen” to Robert Townsend’s Beyoncé-starring “Carmen: A Hip-Hopera.” With the plainly titled “Carmen,” ballet star and first-time feature director Benjamin Millepied joins that club, mostly eschewing song in an attempt to conjure the material’s intensity through dance. He is only intermittently successful.

‘Judy Blume Forever’: How to Watch the Heartwarming Doc Online - variety.com
variety.com
20.04.2023

‘Judy Blume Forever’: How to Watch the Heartwarming Doc Online

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. A new documentary about Judy Blume sheds light on the profound impact that the beloved children’s book writer had on a whole generation of young girls.

‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground - variety.com
variety.com
14.04.2023

‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ Review: Fascinating Deep Dive Into Hospital Practice Shows the Body as a Temple, a Dreamscape and a Battleground

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s nearly 30 years since the global franchise of Body Worlds exhibitions — collections of dissected and plastinated human cadavers, equal parts science lesson and carnival attraction — racked up ticket sales and stoked controversy in multiple international markets. Anatomist (or ringmaster) Gunther von Hagens professed to display the body as it had never been publicly viewed before, and there was certainly a lurid fascination to Body Worlds’ vision of what we look like under the skin. That sense of revelation is recalled in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s extraordinary new documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” which likewise delves dizzyingly beneath the flesh to show organs, systems and actions that we know are inside us, but tend to keep tidily out of mind.

‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ Review: The Power of Christ (and Russell Crowe) Mostly Compels You in Yet Another Possession Chiller - variety.com - USA - Florida - Rome
variety.com
07.04.2023

‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ Review: The Power of Christ (and Russell Crowe) Mostly Compels You in Yet Another Possession Chiller

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the face of it, “The Pope’s Exorcist” would have you believe that it’s rooted in the real-life experiences of the late Father Gabriele Amorth, the Catholic priest who served for 30 years as the head exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. Its screenwriting credits proclaim as much, for starters, while a surfeit of onscreen dates and locations in the early going lend proceedings the faintest of docudrama veneers; moreover, the film is backed by the non-profit production arm of the Jesuit research university Loyola Marymount, with Loyola rector Father Edward J. Siebert among its executive producers. Even Catholics in high places, it turns out, have a sense of humor: You needn’t wait for the “work of fiction” disclaimer in the closing credits to discern that “The Pope’s Exorcist” is ripely fantastical trash, inspired by Amorth’s work in much the same way that SunnyD is inspired by Florida oranges, and no less enjoyable for those liberties. Rather than the Bible or any of Amorth’s autobiographies, Julius Avery’s film instead swears by the trusty story template shaped by every demonic-possession horror film since “The Exorcist” a full half-century ago, as a hapless American teen is inhabited by an ancient minion of Satan with increasingly yucky, upchucky consequences, while a venerable priest is called upon to clear up the mess.

‘One True Loves’ Review: Simu Liu Puts His Heart on Hold in a Generic Romantic Melodrama - variety.com
variety.com
06.04.2023

‘One True Loves’ Review: Simu Liu Puts His Heart on Hold in a Generic Romantic Melodrama

Guy Lodge Film Critic It was recently announced that ever-prolific online content factory Buzzfeed would begin using artificial intelligence technology to generate articles — so can A.I. screenwriting be far behind? Amid a surfeit of production company idents at the outset of “One True Loves,” the presence of Buzzfeed Studios’ logo brings that question to mind; the rigidly generic love story that ensues keeps it there. In fact, this adaptation of a 2016 bestseller by Taylor Jenkins Reid (“Daisy Jones & The Six”) was scripted by the author herself, in collaboration with her husband Alex. There’s scant evidence of personal investment, however, in this clean, anodyne drama of messy romantic conflicts, in which everyone from director Andy Fickman to stars Simu Liu, Phillipa Soo and Luke Bracey is working in strict get-the-job-done mode.

‘Wild Life’ Review: Clothing Magnates Turned Conservationists Return Chile to Itself in a Seductive, Slightly One-Sided Eco-Doc - variety.com - USA - Chile - Argentina
variety.com
25.03.2023

‘Wild Life’ Review: Clothing Magnates Turned Conservationists Return Chile to Itself in a Seductive, Slightly One-Sided Eco-Doc

Guy Lodge Film Critic Doug and Kris Tompkins’ dream sounded like a fanciful one. Seduced by a region of ravishing South American wilderness in which they found particular sanctuary, and wishing to protect it from any insensitive or unseemly development, they landed on a solution both simple and absurd-sounding: Why not simply buy as much of it as possible? Backed by the fortune they’d collectively amassed from the clothing industry — Doug as the founder of Esprit and The North Face, Kris as the former CEO of Patagonia — the couple successfully parlayed business tycoon status into an unprecedented scale of eco-activism: As one talking head notes in “Wild Life,” Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s soaring documentary tribute to the Tompkins’ romance and shared conservationist mission, they “could do anything, and chose to do anything.”

‘Rye Lane’ Review: Long Unloved on Screen, South London Gets the ‘Notting Hill’ Treatment in an Effervescent Romcom - variety.com - Chelsea
variety.com
16.03.2023

‘Rye Lane’ Review: Long Unloved on Screen, South London Gets the ‘Notting Hill’ Treatment in an Effervescent Romcom

Guy Lodge Film Critic Non-Londoners might think of the U.K. capital as a single city, the perceived interchangeability of its regions and locations evident in many a notionally London-set but geographically manic film where characters stroll from Chelsea Bridge to the heart of Soho in a matter of minutes. Residents know that its quadrants are so disparate as to be whole separate ecosystems, with the Thames River that separates north from south London a virtual equator running through the city. Those who have toured the Big Smoke via the movies — in particular, the idealized, exportable London of Working Title trifles and “Paddington” pictures — are largely familiar with the most leafy, genteel streets of the north and west, with the increasingly bourgeois east lately getting a look-in. But the diverse, dynamic neighborhoods of the south have received less than their due on screen, which is where Raine Allen-Miller’s delightful romantic comedy “Rye Lane” aims to set things right.

Alzheimer’s Doc ‘The Eternal Memory’ Scores Multiple Sales for Dogwoof Following Sundance, Berlin Bows (EXCLUSIVE) - variety.com - Australia - Britain - Spain - New Zealand - Italy - Canada - South Korea - Chile - Japan - Berlin - Israel - city Copenhagen
variety.com
15.03.2023

Alzheimer’s Doc ‘The Eternal Memory’ Scores Multiple Sales for Dogwoof Following Sundance, Berlin Bows (EXCLUSIVE)

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s documentary about love, memory and Alzheimer’s disease “The Eternal Memory” has scored a slew of international sales after making a splash at Sundance and Berlin. Dogwoof, the British sales company specialized in high-profile docs, has announced multiple deals on “Eternal Memory,” which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary in January and was a recent standout at the Berlinale where it had its European bow. The hot doc is screening later this week at the CPH:DOX documentary film festival in Copenhagen. Dogwoof partnered with MTV Documentary Films to represent “The Eternal Memory” for international sales soon after its Sundance premiere. They have now scored sales on the doc to: Edge Entertainment (Nordics); Madman (Australia and New Zealand); Sherry Media (Canada); I Wonder Pictures (Italy); BTeam Pictures (Spain); Periscoop (Benelux); Atnine Film (South Korea); Synca (Japan); LEV (Israel), and Restart (Former Yugoslavia).

‘Sisi & I’ Review: Lively, Gorgeously Attired Costume Drama Continues the Radicalization of Austria’s Empress Elisabeth - variety.com - Austria - Germany - Hungary
variety.com
12.03.2023

‘Sisi & I’ Review: Lively, Gorgeously Attired Costume Drama Continues the Radicalization of Austria’s Empress Elisabeth

Guy Lodge Film Critic Nearly 125 years after her assassination, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria — or Sisi to her enduring cultists — continues to inspire a veritable industry of portraiture in Europe: In the last year alone, a novel, two TV series (one of them a glossy Netflix affair) and two feature films have been dedicated to the tightly corseted royal icon. Viewers outside the Continental sphere of Sisi-mania may only have registered one of those films, Marie Kreutzer’s chic, subversive anti-biopic “Corsage,” which might make the second, German director Frauke Finsterwalder’s lush, irreverent “Sisi & I,” seem to them a too-soon spare — coincidentally repeating several tricks from Kreutzer’s anachronistic playbook with its modern feminist inflections, contemporary soundtrack cues and sensational fashions, albeit with plenty of its own panache.

‘Opponent’ Review: A Refugee Turns to Wrestling in a Sharp, Stressful Social Thriller - variety.com - Iran
variety.com
12.03.2023

‘Opponent’ Review: A Refugee Turns to Wrestling in a Sharp, Stressful Social Thriller

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s striking how often the word “removal” comes up in various governments’ official policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers — a pointedly chosen term that conjures images of inanimate refuse or clutter awaiting collection, rather than human lives in desperate limbo. Fail to make your case to officials and you’ll be “removed,” a near-literally humanizing threat that hangs over Milad Alami’s tense, bristling social thriller “Opponent” like a pounding migraine. Following an Iranian wrestler and father whose urgent reasons for fleeing his homeland emerge aren’t entirely what he claims them to be, this is a tightly wound affair that unravels an obscured past and an uncertain future neatly in tandem. Alami maintains suspense at both ends of his narrative without making a blank cypher of his protagonist, played with seething specificity by an electrifying Payman Maadi.

‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’ Review: Multicultural Relationship Study Respects Muslim Traditions But Obeys Romcom Rules - variety.com - Britain - Greece
variety.com
11.03.2023

‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’ Review: Multicultural Relationship Study Respects Muslim Traditions But Obeys Romcom Rules

Guy Lodge Film Critic Early on in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” enterprising London-based filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) pitches a proposed documentary about Muslim arranged marriages to a pair of white male commissioners. They’re bored and disengaged until they realize how the topic can be dressed up in the tropes and lingo of Western romantic comedy to appeal to a general British audience: One suggests interview inserts in the style of “When Harry Met Sally,” the other name-drops “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” as a reference point. When Zoe suggests titling the doc “Love Contractually,” the deal is done. Sharper than anything else in Shekhar Kapur’s pleasant, easygoing comedy, the scene neatly satirizes how nuanced cross-cultural material can be blandly packaged and whitewashed for the mainstream — a point that would land harder if “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” didn’t proceed to do much the same thing. At a push, you could credit the film — a first feature screenwriting credit for producer and former journalist Jemima Khan — with some meta self-awareness as it tackles a thorny, divisive cultural institution in the sweetest, sunniest terms possible, down to its own recurring “When Harry Met Sally”-style inserts. But to what end, exactly? As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.

French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Golden Bear at Berlin - variety.com - France - Berlin
variety.com
25.02.2023

French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Golden Bear at Berlin

Guy Lodge Film Critic Veteran French docmaker Nicolas Philibert was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, taking the prize for his film “On the Adamant,” a poignant observational study of a Paris mental health care facility. He received the award from jury president Kristen Stewart, after the star offered an extended and plainly heartfelt ode to the film’s humanity and simplicity: “People have gone in circles for thousands of years trying to pin down what can be deemed art, who’s allowed to do it and what determines its value,” she said, citing the boundary-pushing nature of the festival, and namechecking such opposing philosophers on the matter as Aristotle, Barthes, Sontag and Beavis & Butthead, before concluding, “For all of us, you just know it when you see it.”

Berlin Film Festival Awards (Updating Live) - variety.com - Berlin - city Tehran
variety.com
25.02.2023

Berlin Film Festival Awards (Updating Live)

Guy Lodge Film Critic The official awards ceremony of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is under way, with Kristen Stewart’s jury set to announce their winners from the Competition selections. This post will be updated as they’re announced.Previously announced: AUDIENCE AWARDS Panorama Audience Award: “Sira,” Apolline TraoréSecond Prize: “The Burdened,” Amr GamalThird Prize: “Midwives,” Léa Fehner Panorama Documentary Audience Award: “Kokomo City,” D. SmithSecond Prize: “The Eternal Memory,” Maite AlberdiThird Prize: “The Cemetery of Cinema,” Thierno Souleymane Diallo

‘Till the End of the Night’ Review: A Transgender Romance Meets a German Policier With Unconvincing Results - variety.com - Germany - Beyond
variety.com
25.02.2023

‘Till the End of the Night’ Review: A Transgender Romance Meets a German Policier With Unconvincing Results

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Till the End of the Night” opens with what initially seems a Brechtian flourish: a nifty time-lapse shot of a bare shell of an apartment being painted, fitted, decorated and accessorized to an apparently lived-in state, as a vintage German torch song by Heidi Brühl crackles over the soundtrack. It’s not a film set being dressed, however, but a police one — the home base for an elaborate undercover investigation. It’s not the first time Christoph Hochhäusler’s romantic detective thriller will hint at subversive ambitions that turn out, upon closer investigation, to be rather conventional. Tossing a fraught transgender love story in the middle of an otherwise standard cop procedural, the film doesn’t much satisfy on either level, with superficial sexual politics and slack suspense. Despite a Berlinale competition slot, prospects beyond home turf appear limited.

‘On the Adamant’ Review: Nicolas Philibert Returns With a Tender Tour of a Mental Health Sanctuary - variety.com - Berlin - city Sanctuary
variety.com
24.02.2023

‘On the Adamant’ Review: Nicolas Philibert Returns With a Tender Tour of a Mental Health Sanctuary

Guy Lodge Film Critic Trends in documentary-making have shifted radically since Nicolas Philibert’s “Être et Avoir” was a surprise arthouse hit two decades ago: That sweetly observational little film, following the ins and outs of a village elementary school over the course of a year, seems a quaintly modest proposition beside today’s more slickly immersive and narrativized nonfiction breakouts. If times have changed, however, Philibert has not. “On the Adamant,” his first feature in 10 years, finds him once more examining the human workings of a care-based institution from a reserved but compassionate distance, avoiding commentary and editorialization in favor of real-life character portraiture. It turns out to be the right approach for the institution under scrutiny: The Adamant, a day-care center in central Paris for adults with a variety of mental disorders, offering its visitors a range of therapy, education and cultural activity. The human subjects here are both expressive and highly vulnerable, open to the low-key, non-invasive presence of Philibert’s camera, and the film is content to be an undulating patchwork of their everyday moods and moments, rather than anything more strenuously conceptual. Suited to specialist distributors and streaming platforms, “On the Adamant” might not achieve the crossover success Philibert has found in the past, but it’s a warm reminder of his perceptive gifts: A premiere slot in Berlin’s main competition, alongside much sleeker, more formally ambitious fiction fare, effectively welcomes him back to the auteur leagues.

‘Limbo’ Review: Simon Baker Opens a Cold Case and Finds Searing Racial Tension in a Starkly Atmospheric Outback Noir - variety.com - Australia
variety.com
24.02.2023

‘Limbo’ Review: Simon Baker Opens a Cold Case and Finds Searing Racial Tension in a Starkly Atmospheric Outback Noir

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a parched austerity to the landscape of the Australian outback, along with an embedded history of conflict between Indigenous and invading occupants, that makes it irresistibly well-suited to screen westerns. But there’s a loneliness to it, too, a sense that its quiet vastness could swallow you whole and without trace, that lends itself as easily to moody, smoky mystery. Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen has twice before dabbled in the harsh, dry space where those genre possibilities overlap, in his features “Goldstone” and “Mystery Road.” In his latest, most accomplished film “Limbo,” he once more surveys the region with a critical eye, finding a history of racial injustice in its sharp cracks and long shadows. But the genre styling this time has been pushed all the way to stark, monochromatic stylization. This is outback noir — oblique, secretive and as hard-boiled as the ground is hard-baked — and Sen wears it well.

‘Afire’ Review: A Summer Retreat Brings No Peace in Christian Petzold’s Superb, Smoldering New Film - variety.com - Germany - county Christian - Beyond
variety.com
22.02.2023

‘Afire’ Review: A Summer Retreat Brings No Peace in Christian Petzold’s Superb, Smoldering New Film

Guy Lodge Film Critic If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny, many-layered new film “Afire,” is the latest in a long line of onscreen scribes to learn that lesson. But over the course of a hot, rainless summer by the Baltic coastline, the elusiveness of his imagined masterwork turns out to be far from his greatest problem: Writer’s block spills over into bitter social paralysis, exposing every facet of life he doesn’t yet know how to live, let alone write about. All the while, the surrounding woodsy landscape wilts and scorches, the threat of natural disaster lending an urgent pull to this dry, elegant comedy of manners — so dry, in fact, it’s just a breath of wind away from tragedy.

‘20,000 Species of Bees’ Review: Gentle, Humane Spanish Drama Chronicles a Young Trans Girl’s Summer of Self-Realization - variety.com - Spain
variety.com
22.02.2023

‘20,000 Species of Bees’ Review: Gentle, Humane Spanish Drama Chronicles a Young Trans Girl’s Summer of Self-Realization

Guy Lodge Film Critic In time, stories like “20,000 Species of Bees” will come to feel as commonplace within the coming-of-age genre as tales of first love or heartbreak: a young girl, unhappy in her skin and at odds with her family, finally recognizes her gender over the course of one pivotal summer, and persuades others to recognize it too. For now, Spanish writer-director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s mellow, softly piercing debut feature joins the likes of Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy” and Emanuele Crialese’s “L’Immensità” in a select but growing canon of trans or nonbinary childhood studies. Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.

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