The most disturbing part of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang isn’t necessarily the set-up. Five orphaned Turkish sisters are barricaded into their uncle’s home after “shaming themselves” by swimming with a group of boys. Such medieval practices may be shocking, but…
Movie Review – “Timbuktu”
The man with the megaphone walks the alleyways, his mechanical voice echoing off the buildings. “Cigarettes are forbidden. Music is forbidden.” In the outskirts men with automatic weapons blast apart local fetishes, their clay bodies bursting over the sand. “Women…
Movie Review – “Wild Tales”
I remember how frustrated I felt the evening of the 2015 Academy Awards when Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I found the film hopelessly generic and derivative of about half a dozen…
Movie Review – ‘The Lobster’
I keep seeing people describe Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster as a comedy. Though many elements are undeniably comedic, The Lobster belongs first and foremost to the horror genre; a fact all the more impressive considering it never seeks to deliberately…
Movie Review – ‘Bleeding Heart’
Would it be impolite to point out a filmmaker’s excellence as a director while also chastising their mediocrity as a writer? Perhaps, but thankfully I’m spared such a conundrum with Diane Bell’s Bleeding Heart, a surprisingly powerful thriller about an…
Movie Review – ‘Tale of Tales’
All three of them end in blood: the story of the albino twins born to two different mothers by a necromancer’s spell; the story of the beautiful young princess accidentally bargained off by her foolish, distracted father as the bride…
Movie Review – ‘Jauja’
How odd: I feel like I shouldn’t like Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja half as much as I do. A mystery without an answer (or is it an answer without a mystery?), Jauja feels at times like an almost-Western, an almost-historical drama,…
