Adopting Audrey
ADOPTING AUDREY’s emotional beats are slight, often landing with less force than they could. However, it still explores something interesting about the generational divide between boomers and millennials.
Category Archives: Festival Coverage
Past Lives
PAST LIVES – Celine Song’s deeply human film about the pain of missed chances and the hard truths – flows from beat to beat with aching precision and evokes guttural melancholy over and over again.
Girl
Adura Onashile’s GIRL is a gentle and sometimes hypnotic view of a life laced with the after-effects of trauma. The film is an elegantly slow-burning drama, and its willingness to let the visuals and understated performances establish an atmosphere allows the audience to feel Grace and Ama’s emotions all the more keenly.
Femme
FEMME comes with intriguing moral grey areas that make the picture so utterly compelling, despite the broad strokes and cliché from which the narrative framework takes inspiration.
BlackBerry
Glenn Howerton almost rescues this uneven, chaotic film but this is the BlackBerry of techy biopics. It’s nothing new anymore.
Infinity Pool
INFINITY POOL is a compelling film that effectively garners visceral and spontaneous reactions to thoughtfully constructed grotesqueries. However, the scant implementation of the ideas driving the characters’ behaviour leaves it like that hotel leisure showpiece; the lack of boundaries is an intricately and considerately engineered illusion. A look beneath its glistening surface and the safe confinement becomes all too apparent.
Blue Jean and media-reinforced heteronormativity
There is a central idea between the dramatic unfoldings of BLUE JEAN: internalised homophobia triggers a fight or flight response. Walter Bradford Cannon’s famous ‘fight or flight’ theory, otherwise known as Acute Stress Response, is referenced early in Georgia Oakley’s outstanding feature debut. In BLUE JEAN, the stress Oakley’s Geordie protagonist Jean responds to is that of Margaret Thatcher’s homophobic amendment to British Law: Section 28.
Aftersun
Charlotte Wells’ feature debut showcases the assured hand she had already demonstrated in her short film work and enhances it further to balance tone and pace throughout a touching story of a daughter and her troubled father on holiday. Calum (Paul Mescal) takes his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a package holiday to Turkey, … Continue reading Aftersun
My Small Land
MY SMALL LAND should launch two stellar careers with its astute portrait – told in three languages – of a specific situation that feels transferable in this age of global anxiety and xenophobia.
Off the Rails
OFF THE RAILS is a breathless narrative that may have benefited from reflection and structure, but the spark and spirit are captivating throughout.