Festival Review: Big Father, Small Father And Other Stories / Cha và con và (2015)
★★★☆☆
An atmospheric evocation of life on the banks of the Saigon River, Dang Di Phan’s Big Father, Small Father And Other Stories is a gently haunting muddle.
★★★☆☆
An atmospheric evocation of life on the banks of the Saigon River, Dang Di Phan’s Big Father, Small Father And Other Stories is a gently haunting muddle.
★☆☆☆☆
A carnival of singing, dancing, car chases and bullets, Wen Jiang’s Gone With The Bullets gets lost in an amorphous hall of mirrors.
★★★★☆
Turning the camera upon himself for the third time, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is a moving portrait of the politics of filming and the filming of politics.
★★★★★
Exposing India’s labyrinthine judicial system, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature Court brings a slow dread to the impossibility of justice.
★★★★☆
Reimagining Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment in the north of the Philippines, Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End Of History is a stunning slowburner of epic proportions.
★★★★☆
Winner of the Camera d’Or for best debut feature at Cannes 2013, Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo is a masterfully intimate look at Singaporean family life.
★★★★☆
The emotional secrets of two families are revealed when an Iranian returns to Paris to finalise his divorce from his French wife.
★★★★☆
A testimony to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in clay, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture is a poetic and intelligent rumination on survival, memory and murder.
★★★☆☆
A meditation on the ties that bind, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Like Father Like Son is a delicately Japanese exploration of fatherhood, blood and ambition.
★★★☆☆
Like someone in love, Hong Sangsoo’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon draws out the loneliness of youth as a pretty student negotiates family, love and relationships.
★★☆☆☆
Canvassing a breadth of opinion from Tibet’s leaders in exile, Dirk Simon’s When The Dragon Swallowed The Sun traces the battle lines drawn and lost during the Beijing Olympics.
★★★☆☆
An ethereal wander through Japanese relationships, Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love reveals the clumsy confusion of human communication.
★★★★☆
Caught between tradition and progress, Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist turns Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling novel into a cat and mouse thriller.
★★★☆☆
On location, language and love in a time of change, Aditya Assarat’s Hi-So uncovers Thailand after the tsunami.