Review

By Jacob Mertens. In the opening moments of Mike Mills’ Beginners we see a vase of dead flowers against a dirty kitchen window. The camera is tight, shallow focus, not letting the room breathe. The film cuts to Ewan McGregor’s character Oliver wandering through a near empty house. He dumps […]

By Bryan Nixon. Hollywood takes itself too seriously, especially when it should be anything but serious. Common sense dictates that a citizen who is going to the theater to see a film titled Cowboys & Aliens would expect a witty action comedy, in the vein of Men in Black (1997), […]

By Daria Kabanova. A man walks into a conference room where a Formula One pre-race meeting is about to begin. The camera loves the man’s face, even though it is tired, conflicted, frustrated. The room is full of people, but the camera is only marginally interested in them: it follows […]

By Daniel Lindvall. The original version of The Housemaid (1960) is often listed among the two or three best South Korean films of all time by local critics. The film and its director, Kim Ki-young (1922-98), were (re-)discovered internationally a little more than a decade ago. Kim, who started his […]

By Jamie Isbell. A large black curtain slowly parts and reveals three grey screens. Then a dense and inconsistent ripple of excitement erupts from a shuffling and enthusiastically rowdy crowd flooding the Roundhouse in North London on this evening of June 1st, 2011. It takes a few minutes of chants […]

Book review by Sebastian Manley. Variously characterised as an American art cinema, a B-division of Hollywood, and a marketplace of talent and ideas, the US ‘independent’ sector has inspired a good deal of stimulating debate and speculation since its inception. In this decade in particular, independent film has been the […]

By Jacob Mertens. If art is a reflection of our lives, then what becomes of art when we look at it through its own prism? In Clio Barnard’s genre-defying The Arbor, we see the artistic process fold in on itself, like a complex origami machination of narrative and documentary that […]

By Carolyn Lake. Enjoying its world premiere on May 18 at Sydney’s Popcorn Taxi, Carlo Ledesma’s Australia indie horror flick, The Tunnel, has already garnered an audience of over seven hundred thousand, and that’s just the downloads. The brainchild of writer-producers Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvey, The Tunnel took an […]

By William Frasca. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats simply because I was able to recognize very early in the film he put “style over substance.” Not to say that there is not a message in the film about love and friendship, but that […]

By Janine Gericke. A tree has wide spread roots – thousands of forking lines that twine into a long straight trunk – and branches, which themselves twine up and away toward the sun. And that is the very structure of the story elements woven into Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. This […]