Echo of the Mountain takes as its subject the Huichol artist Santos de la Torre, who lives and works in the western Sierra Madre in near-anonymity.
Norte, the End of History
Lav Diaz’s novelistic ambitions and formal rigour don’t quite blend in Norte, but it is saved by the breadth of its scope and political rendering of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Li’l Quinquin
Playing with the tropes of the procedural crime series drama, Bruno Dumont’s newest film is an unexpectedly funny venture into comedy that still retains the thematic darkness of the director’s previous work.
La última película
Far from being purely an exercise in nostalgia or a fashionable technological anachronism, it displays a mastery of a format with its own aesthetic possibilities that simply can not be replaced.
Jauja
Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, which tells the story of a military captain’s struggle through the Patagonian wilderness to find his daughter, is a fascinating new departure for the director.
What Now? Remind Me
Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me displays a refreshing antidote to filmic solipsism; a personal documentary that reveals a willingness to join the personal with the historical, and life to cinema.
National Gallery
Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery is a delicate and quietly intelligent film from one of the Old Masters of documentary film.
Manakamana
MANAKAMANA, playing at Melbourne International Film Festival may put off some in its premise, but its success arises from the ethical and philosophical questions about ethnography, filmmaking and the relationship between the two that is engendered in its systematic formal approach.
Story of My Death
Albert Serra’s latest film has a B-movie concept – Dracula and Casanova are the protagonists – but in fact is a beautiful and experimental feature that plays with adaptation, and perhaps the best thing in competition at Filmfest München.
Still the Water
Naomi Kawase’s newest film is not one of her best; a family drama set against the grand cycle of nature that reaches for the profound but doesn’t quite attain it.