Festival Review: The Program (2015)
★★★☆☆
With an outstanding performance from Ben Foster, Stephen Frears’ The Program gets bogged down in intricately retelling the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong.
★★★☆☆
With an outstanding performance from Ben Foster, Stephen Frears’ The Program gets bogged down in intricately retelling the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong.
★★★☆☆
After An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s He Named Me Malala brings Malala Yousafzai’s story to the masses. Just a little too easily.
★★★☆☆
A violent exploration of civil war in West Africa, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts Of No Nation is a powerful portrait of a continent thrown into darkness.
★★☆☆☆
A German horror film of Berlin clubs and imaginary creatures, Akiz’s Der Nachtmahr is a pulsating delirium of colourful and haunting images.
★★★☆☆
Recreating a brief episode in James Dean’s life, Anton Corbijn’s Life sees the icon on the cusp of fame thanks to a series of photographs for Life magazine.
★★★★★
Depicting the Abkhazia conflict through the lens of an outsider, Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines is an emotional and haunting study of the senselessness of war.
★★★★☆
Ain’t no mountain high enough, Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest climbs the nuts and bolts of the fight to the summit without descending into human conflict.
★★★☆☆
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.
★★☆☆☆
Highlighting one teenage girl’s struggle to manage life as the only hearing member of her deaf family, Eric Lartigau’s La Famille Bélier is riddled with clichés.
★★★★☆
Evoking the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini lets the controversial Italian filmmaker’s thoughts and ideas do the scandalising.
★★★★★
Jerry Rothwell’s inspirational documentary How To Change The World explores the birth of Greenpeace and the tumultuous sea-change it sparked in environmentalism.
★★★★☆
With a cracking performance from Regina Casé and a sharp script, Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother is a well polished gem of class friction in Brazil.
★★★☆☆
A fictional retelling of the bloody final days of the Medellin cartel, Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar: Paradise Lost brings a personal touch to Escobar’s violence.
★★★☆☆
A fast-paced and tense police thriller, Hans Herbots’ The Treatment plumbs the murky depths of child abuse and male impotence.