A Girl At My Door (2014)
★★★☆☆
Combining gay rights with all the tropes of a horror movie, July Jung’s A Girl At My Door is strangely haunting, but struggles with a split personality.
Asia
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
★★★☆☆
An Iranian skateboarding vampire movie, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a quirky, stylish addition to the genre.
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014)
★★★★☆
With a delicate, mesmerising performance from Rinko Kikuchi, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a darkly comic tale of misadventure – tragic, odd and uplifting.
Festival Review: Chasuke’s Journey (2015)
★★★☆☆
Despite a promising concept of heavenly screenwriters, Sabu’s Chasuke’s Journey ends in an occasionally visually arresting but hare-brained disappointment.
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.
Festival Review: Gone With The Bullets (2014)
★☆☆☆☆
A carnival of singing, dancing, car chases and bullets, Wen Jiang’s Gone With The Bullets gets lost in an amorphous hall of mirrors.
Festival Review: Taxi Tehran (2015)
★★★★☆
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.
Festival Review: Court
★★★★★
Exposing India’s labyrinthine judicial system, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature Court brings a slow dread to the impossibility of justice.
Norte, The End Of History (2013)
★★★★☆
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.
Ilo Ilo (2013)
★★★★☆
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 Past / Le Passé (2013)
★★★★☆
The emotional secrets of two families are revealed when an Iranian returns to Paris to finalise his divorce from his French wife.
The Missing Picture / L’Image Manquante (2013)
★★★★☆
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.
Like Father, Like Son (2013)
★★★☆☆
A meditation on the ties that bind, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Like Father Like Son is a delicately Japanese exploration of fatherhood, blood and ambition.
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)
★★★☆☆
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.