Where most nature documentaries focus on anthropomorphising their subjects, Gunda instead zoomorphises the viewer. This is a black and white documentary that purely observes. We watch farm animals (limited to pigs, chickens and cows) and there is no music or voiceover. It is just animals in their given environment. The shooting style is uniformly immersive, … Continue reading Gunda (Review)
Tag: 2021
First Cow (Review)
Kelly Reichardt is incredibly gifted at gleaning gold from atypical cinematic perspectives. This is most apparent in Meek's Cutoff and Certain Women (though also true of Wendy and Lucy) and continues, beautifully, in First Cow. In this film, we follow Cookie (John Magaro), a skilled cook who begins the film in a group of Trappers. … Continue reading First Cow (Review)
City Hall (Review)
Revered documentarian Frederick Wiseman's four and a half hour documentary about Boston's city government ends up, frustratingly, as too reflective of its subject. This is a well meaning, extremely competently put together thing that is often fascinating but, ultimately, is so unwieldy and talky that it never really gets anything done. This is an exhaustive, … Continue reading City Hall (Review)
Minari (Review)
At its heart, Minari is a film about assimilation. Why it is such a wonderful film is because it is about in this is so many ways. The most overt layer of this is about the cultural divides the film depicts, focusing on a family that have emigrated to America from Korea who are in … Continue reading Minari (Review)
The White Tiger (Review)
You can sense the award winning novel at the heart of this adaptation. There are moments of fascinating subtext and well judged relationships - novelistic moments. Unfortunately, this film is overwhelmed by surface, and by aesthetic, turning an interesting exploration of the pernicious impacts of the Indian caste-system (and ingrained inequality) into something flashy but … Continue reading The White Tiger (Review)
Malcolm and Marie (Review)
It feels like too much has been written about Malcolm and Marie already, mostly because of how utterly inessential and forgettable the film is. When taken as proof that you can make a film during Covid-19 - that is thankfully not about Covid - it is, well, just that. It is also proof on the … Continue reading Malcolm and Marie (Review)
The Dig (Review)
The best way to describe Simon Stone’s film about the monumental discovery at Sutton Hoo in 1939 is through the metaphor of a dig itself. This is something that was definitely worth uncovering - you can tell there’s gold here. However, in approaching this project, Stone has dug too widely and only scratched the surface … Continue reading The Dig (Review)
Josep (Review)
Art can do so much, especially when intersecting with reality. It is so tempting, when presenting reality, to slip into the objective and the strictly realist - thinking it adds reality and truth. Of course, none of us experience the world objectively and art that explores reality is at its best when it takes advantage … Continue reading Josep (Review)
Citadel (Review)
The short film shot from a filmmaker’s room during lockdown has already become somewhat of a cliché (Mati Diop’s In My Room being a highlight of the genre). This view out of a London window during Covid lockdown fits firmly into that category, but filmmaker John Smith adds a political edge that makes this stand … Continue reading Citadel (Review)
Assorted Opinions 