Dancing In Jaffa (2013)
★★★☆☆
Israeli and Palestininan schoolchildren overcoming their prejudices as they are taught to ballroom dance together is movingly captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
★★★☆☆
Israeli and Palestininan schoolchildren overcoming their prejudices as they are taught to ballroom dance together is movingly captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
★★★☆☆
What can change a man from pacifist to freedom fighter? Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 13 Minutes pays tribute to the German resistant Georg Elser.
★★★★☆
Chosen to premiere at Berlin (home of Cabaret), Mark Christopher’s 54: The Director’s Cut recreates a bygone age of synth-infused hedonism.
★★★☆☆
The comic story of a New York gay couple trying for a baby with their 30-something best friend, Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby falls apart in the final reel.
★★★★☆
Did video kill the radio? Nicolas Philibert uncovers the mystery of the medium in his warmly human documentary La Maison de la Radio.
★★★★☆
A beautiful adaptation of Vera Brittain’s bestselling memoir, James Kent’s Testament Of Youth is a bitter tale of love in wartime for the 21st century.
★★★★☆
With a brilliant one-hander from Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed trekking the PCT, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild makes for rehydrated but beautiful soul food.
★★★★★
Ferocious, electric and unrelenting, Simmons and Teller never miss a beat in Damien Chazelle’s phenomenal second feature Whiplash.
★★★★☆
If this is a man. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last Of The Unjust recuts unused Shoah interviews to reveal the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein – Europe’s last Jewish Elder.
★★★☆☆
A dramatic reconstruction of New Zealand’s worst air disaster, Charlotte Purdy’s Erebus: Into The Unknown loses itself in the snows of Antarctica.
★★★★☆
Dramatisation of Stephen Hawking’s life from gifted university student and romance with the woman who became his wife, to international acclaim as a physicist and the break-up of his marriage.
★★★☆☆
Horror story which begins as schoolchildren and their teachers are evacuated from London to a deserted house in the remote countryside in World War II.
★★★☆☆
A well-deserved and accomplished tribute to a survivor’s trials of war, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is nevertheless a shallow experience of suffering.
★★★★☆
Going back to the future through interviews with Switzerland’s first gay married couple, Stefan Haupt’s half-documentary The Circle reveals a postwar openness ahead of its time.