Country Canada
I will be upfront about this one: Concrete Turned to Sand is a film built on an aesthetic I simply do not connect with, and no amount of good intentions could win me round. It is a slow, austere, deliberately anti-narrative piece of observational cinema, and while I can
Rating: 2.5★
Kamikaze Girls arrived in Japan in the summer of 2004 with considerable momentum behind it, adapted from Novala Takemoto's 2002 novel of the same name, which had already found a devoted readership among the subcultures it affectionately portrays. The novel's world, centred on the Lolita fashion
Rating: 3.5★
Adam Elliot is not a filmmaker who deals in the comfortable or the tidy. The Melbourne-born writer and director built his reputation through a series of short clay-animated films, each one a small, handmade biography of someone living at the margins: disabled, lonely, overlooked, and yet somehow persisting.
Rating: 1.5★
There is a particular kind of British comedy export that arrives in cinemas already slightly embarrassed about itself, and Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) sits comfortably in that tradition. Based on Harry Enfield's recurring sketch characters from Harry Enfield and Chums, the film transplants Kevin the surly
Rating: 3.5★
There is a version of O Brother, Where Art Thou? that exists purely as a genre exercise: three bumbling convicts on the run through Depression-era Mississippi, chased by a lawman who seems to belong to a different and more unforgiving film entirely. That version would have been perfectly watchable.
Rating: 3.5★
Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket in 1987, adapting Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers with co-writers Michael Herr (whose own Vietnam memoir Dispatches had already reshaped how the war could be written about) and Kubrick himself. The film arrived two years after Oliver Stone's
Country Romania
Between Revolutions is a genuinely powerful and intelligent piece of work, and one I admired more than I was always able to lose myself in. Vlad Petri's documentary is a quietly ambitious thing: a history of two uprisings, the Iranian revolution against the Shah and the Romanian revolution
Rating: 2.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Martin Lawrence was about as bankable a comedy star as Hollywood had on its books. Coming off the back of the long-running sitcom Martin and a string of successful films through the late 1990s, he had carved out a particular niche: the fast-
Country Luxembourg
Every so often a short film comes along that is so complete, so beautifully judged and so quietly devastating that it puts most features to shame, and I Will Be Alright is one of them. Cyrus Neshvad, Oscar nominated for his short The Red Suitcase, has made something close to
Country United Kingdom
A Tail has a premise so bold and so promising that I spent most of its twelve minutes rooting for it to stick the landing, and I came away admiring a great deal while wishing it had been braver with its ending. Rosie Gaunt-Mathieson's modern mermaid comedy
Country Iran
A Bit of Light is Iranian cinema in its most recognisable register: sombre, calm, atmospheric, and quietly political. Ali Asgari's drama is a restrained, well-acted piece about a man at the end of his tether, and while I admired its control and its performances, its studied emotional
Rating: 2.5★
There is something fitting about a film called Babilônia 2000 arriving at the turn of a millennium. Eduardo Coutinho's documentary, produced in collaboration between VideoFilmes, Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular (CECIP) and TvZERO, plants itself on New Year's Eve 1999 inside the Babilônia and Chapéu
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