Worlds of Difference

Turkish Sight: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates
Climates, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first foray into the digital format, is “a painful, unapologetically downbeat film... at once respulsive and attention-grabbing,” says SIMON WOOD....[Read More]

The Edge of Heaven: A European Union
GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN traverses the cultural divide in Fatih Akin’s follow-up to Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, a film to reconcile German and Turkish differences....[Read More]

Everything goes where time goes: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
Zacharias Kunuk’s and Norman Cohn’s follow-up to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner chronicles the investigations of anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, and his research into Inuit folklore, culture, and history during the 1920s. MUBARAK ALI offers a reading of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen....[Read More]

Breaking Through: The Secret Life of Words
Sarah Polley rejoins writer-director Isabel Coixet in The Secret Life of Words, an immersive, bittersweet ‘sleeper’ about the damaged emotional interior of an oil rig nurse. JACOB POWELL reviews....[Read More]

Still Life: Jia Zhang-ke’s New World
Visionary Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke casts his eye again on the landscape of China’s accelerated economy, rapid social change, and erosion of old to make way for new. TIM WONG is in awe of the director’s latest, Still Life, set amongst the developing Three Gorges Dam....[Read More]

Nights of the living dead: Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen
Family dysfunction is rooted in news of a pending suicide in Nanouk Leopold’s measured Wolfsbergen: a film seemingly about death, both in its literal and figurative forms, discovers MUBARAK ALI....[Read More]

The Way Ahead

Nostalgia for Youth: Falkenberg Farewell
Fraught with uncertainty, life’s crucial transition into adulthood is evoked through the restless youth of five Swedish young men in Falkenberg Farewell. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM relives the moment....[Read More]

Darkness, then Light: Old Joy
“Old Joy’s rhythmic contemplation will pull you right down inside it, almost painfully, but ultimately in uplifting and surprising ways,” writes MELODY NIXON of Kelly Reichardt’s spiritual, minimalist revelation....[Read More]

Framing Reality

Manufacturing Dissent: An Inconvenient Truth for Michael Moore
Eschewing conspiracy theory and flagrant bullshitery, filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk pursue documentarian Michael Moore in their reasoned and well-considered retort, Manufacturing Dissent. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews....[Read More]

Music and the Arts

Punk Serenade: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
The life and times of rock ‘n’ roll frontman, rude boy, and departed punk legend are preserved in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Julien Temple’s ode to The Clash, their lead singer, and his close friend. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews....[Read More]

Love Story: A Band Apart
Multi-racial, psychedelic cult band Love mourned the death of their frontman, Arthur Lee, in 2006. Love Story, SIMON SWEETMAN writes, tells the tale of their music, their influence, and their heart-breaking latter years....[Read More]

Out of the Past

Killer of Sheep: A thesis on life
Charles Burnett’s blaxploitation retort is a microscopic, politically-charged authentication of Black American life. Largely unseen, it screens belatedly in retrospect. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM introduces us to Killer of Sheep’s restored importance....[Read More]

That’s Incredible Cinema

Boy-On-Boy Cat and Mouse: Death Note + Death Note: The Last Name
JOE SHEPPARD gives into the “puerile logic and cult factor” of Death Note and its sequel, Death Note: The Last Name, brought to us back-to-back under the auspices of Ant Timpson’s That’s Incredible Cinema....[Read More]




Worlds of Difference

(un)waking life: Bukowski lives on in Factotum
Charles Bukowski's lethargic alter-ego meanders through the streets, bars and jobs of contemporary Los Angeles in Bent Hamer's Factotum, the Norwegian director's follow-up to his scandinavian gem Kitchen Stories. JACOB POWELL reviews....[Read More]

Remembering Revolution: Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers
BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM drowns himself in Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel’s vast, giddy, richly contextual time capsule of sixties French youth and the fleeting promise of revolution....[Read More]

Tristram Shandy: an unfilmable film
A shambolic merry-go-round of film-within-a-film quandaries, cine-quotations and Steve Coogan in a giant womb, Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is dastardly entertaining. CATHERINE BISLEY watches the chaos unfold....[Read More]

The Way Ahead

Silent Lucidity: Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura
Fabián Bielinsky’s sophomore feature was sadly his last; his sudden and premature death occuring in June this year. The Aura, the follow-up to the wildly popular Nine Queens, screens posthumously at this year’s film festival. JACOB POWELL reviews....[Read More]

Growing Pains: Mutual Appreciation's anxiety of adulthood
TIM WONG knows all too well that the road to adulthood is fraught with uncertainty – an insecurity of age no better portrayed than in Andrew Bujalski's amusing, perfectly observed post-grad film Mutual Appreciation....[Read More]

Framing Reality

Death by Warming: An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore puts his foot down in An Inconvenient Truth, the most urgent and alarming statement on the threat of global warming yet. IAN CHRISTOPHER is all ears....[Read More]

Shattered Lives: considering Iraq in Fragments
James Longley's beautiful, affecting, and urgent document of a war-torn country – conveyed intimately through a trio of personal stories – observes quite literally Iraq in Fragments. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM picks up the pieces....[Read More]

Bowdlerized: This Film is Not Yet Rated
A farcical journey behind the closed doors of America's archaic and wholly secretive MPAA ratings board, Kirby Dick's This Film is Not Yet Rated is at once hilarious and ironic. JACOB POWELL examines the hypocrisy....[Read More]

Music and Dance

Ballets Russes: a company for the ages
At the age of seven CATHERINE BISLEY wanted to be a goat farmer. Two years later, she fixed her sights on being a ballerina. Fickle at heart she also tired of that idea, but many years later, watching the documentary Ballets Russes, she has once again been drawn to tutus, Tchaikovsky and pas de chats....[Read More]

You're invited to: Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Get ready to party like it's 1999 with Dave Chappelle's Block Party, this festival's most affirmative, rambunctious, infectiously entertaining film. SIMON SWEETMAN revelled in the phat beats and comedy gold....[Read More]

Out of the Past

Hard Knock Life: Buñuel’s Los Olvidados
A ruthless and unflinching account of life in the slums of Mexico City, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados remains as powerful and disturbing fifty years on. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM revisits this underseen cinema classic....[Read More]

That's Incredible Cinema

American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
Our grotesque obsession with reality television is put to the sword in documentary American Cannibal: The Road to Reality. JACOB POWELL boards the train wreck...[Read More]

Guns and Fists: A Bittersweet Life
One of four out-and-out revenge sagas to dominate this festival’s That’s Incredible Cinema programme, A Bittersweet Life is easily the coolest, most frenetic, and bleakly humorous of the violent quartet. CALEB STARRENBURG tallies the body count....[Read More]

Taken: Keane's city of lost children
Children are again at the core of Lodge Kerrigan's troubled new world. His latest film, Keane, revisits mental illness in a milieu of urban dread. TIM WONG probes further....[Read More]

Mind Game's brain explosion
This year’s animation programme may be modest in size, but teems with rarefied genius; Masaaki Yuasa’s hallucinogenic anime Mind Game the head-splitting pick of the bunch. CALEB STARRENBURG insists the migranes are all worth it....[Read More]





» Banana in a Nutshell
Bian in like Beckham | By Tze Ming Mok
» Chapter & Verse
Imaging a Tired Land | By Jacob Powell
» Delamu
Tea Horse Route | By Caleb Starrenburg
» High Tension
Death Becomes Her | By Tim Wong
» Homegrown: Works on Film
Little Things | By Benjamin Barrett
» Kung Fu Hustle
Hong Kong Phooey | By Caleb Starrenburg
» Life is a Miracle
Love in a Miracle | By Caleb Starrenburg
» Little Bits of Light
Emerging Light | By Shahir Daud
» Machuca
Rich Boy, Poor Boy | By Caleb Starrenburg
» Minginui
Ghost World | By Tim Wong
» Paradise Now
Strangers in Paradise | By Andrew Brettell
» Ring of Fire + Unforgivable Blackness
Against the Ropes | By John Spry
» The Sea Inside
Tender Mercies | By John Spry
» The Woodsman
Into The Woods | By John Spry





» The Cat Returns
Of -Phobias and -Philias: Fear of cats manifests as a Miyazaki-lite | By Mubarak Ali
» The Corporation
Rainwater, Growth Hormones & Michael Moore | By Kim Lesch
» Free Radicals
Life in Austria's "City of the Future" | By Kunal D'Souza
» Last Life in the Universe
Meeting of Minds: A tiny enormous love story with death, melancholy and lizards | By Mubarak Ali
» Memories of Murder
Nostalgic Perversion: A mid-80s reminisce of the homicidal variety | By Caleb Starrenburg
» A Thousand Months
In the Presence of Absence | By Kunal D'Souza
» The Triplets of Belleville
C'est La Presque Vie (That's almost life) | By Caleb Starrenburg

(Under Construction)