Movies on War 2021: Baby Fingers won the Nordic short-film competition in Elverum, squeezing out plenty of longer and more ‘weighty’ rivals, because it has the capacity to make us think and even to see ourselves with new eyes.
Sciamma’s fifth feature film is immediately striking in its gentleness as well as emotional and visual beauty, but what lies beneath the apparent simplicity are rich layers of structural echoes and quiet metaphors.
«Movies on war may tell us much about war, but especially the exit plan, the path to a genuine peace.»
This heartbreaking, immersive film about the lead-up to the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia is a story of self-preservation and humiliation, with an epilogue that is a great work of art in itself.
Few films in world cinema history owe their existence to as many unlikely coincidences as Jean Renoir’s celebrated La Grande Illusion (1938). In fact, its story and survival may be said to be nothing short of a miracle.
KVIFF 2021: Jan Šikl’s Reconstruction of Occupation may represent a timely reminder of the caprices of power and their human costs and, perhaps above all, the costs of capitulation.
Although the framing story and twist are surprisingly prosaic, for long stretches of the main body Old conjures up a combination of tension, absurdity and chaos that few other films have achieved.
Tromsø International Film Festival’s Silent Film Days: It’s a postmodern pandemic and silent film, a century after its heyday, has never been more relevant. This is the perfect time to revisit the dawn of the cinematic age.
Berlinale 2021: While largely successful both in the quality of the films and in their technical delivery to press and industry members, this year’s Berlinale made it clear that streaming at this level still poses some issues.
The reckless energy of Romeo + Juliet is like that of the teens – any teens! – in love. Having grown up with this adaptation, I thought there was no need to revisit it again; I was wrong.
TIFF 2021: The virtual Tromsø International Film Festival premiered some extraordinary virtual masterpieces this last month. They belied the claustrophobic limitations of tiff.no, and we can only hope they make it soon to a theatre near you.
«If Portrait of a Lady on Fire found desire in the immediacy of the act of seeing, Mona Fastvold’s film locates it deep into the retroactive power of the written word, which turns every diary into a map to salvation.»