Hal Hartley’s latest, Aubrey Plaza-starring NED RIFLE is both continually witty and achingly sad, bolstered by its superb cast.
Gangster Payday
Lee Po-Cheung’s GANGSTER PAYDAY is a successfully blend of straight-up triad drama, culture-clash fable, and even wilfully cheesy Hong-Kong-rom-com, writes Jake Moody.
Lady Maiko
Masayuki Suo’s loose Japanese remake of My Fair Lady is charming, ludicrous, amateurish, languid, and fun, all in equal measure. In the final analysis, it’s a film entirely worth seeing, primarily as a curious and rare case study of what happens when a canonical Western narrative is appropriated in a totally different national and industrial context.
A Taste of Samurai Cooking – A True Love Story
A TASTE OF SAMURAI COOKING is a film that falls flat in most regards: awfully paced, poorly designed, and inexplicably uninterested in its main thematic conceit – the food – it ends up looking and feeling like a Japanese renaissance fair, an insipid and vaguely cringeworthy imitation of real history.
Snow On The Blades
With a protagonist-antagonist relationship resolved in such a ham-fisted manner and overreliance on tired samurai tropes of loyalty and stoicism, Snow on the Blades will enthral only those determined to enjoy its technical panache against their better judgment.
Jasmine
A documentary about the processes of memory, autobiography and ideology, Alain Ughetto’s work of claymation is unique and moving.
The Winter
FX-wiz-turned-director Konstantinos Koutsoliotas’ debut feature is a striking look at creativity, cultural divide and family.
South Is Nothing
Fabio Mollo’s film lives up to its title in an unfortunate way: an interesting premise and quietly evocative cinematography soon give way to an array of incomplete ideas, unsympathetic characters and frustrating inexpressiveness.
Felony
Despite some flawed characterisation and less than interesting subplots, FELONY – a co-production from the exciting Aussie film collective Blue Tongue Films – successfully channels homegrown urban disillusionment into a narrative which deals with abiding film tropes in a fresh and genuine way.