Beau is Afraid

And so he should be. Holy Shit! If you’ve ever worried that there might be something nasty lurking in the attic then this is almost certainly not the film for you. (little hint – it’s a gigantic cock and balls with a rictus smile and a lethal ejaculatory harpoon) But for everyone else, I would…

Beautiful Boy

For legal and technical reasons my review of Beautiful Boy is withheld. Rating. Unclassifiable. Viewed. 5/2/2019 Screen 2

The Forbidden Room

Now you know I like weird. Bunuel is a piece of cake. Fellini, just routine. In my view David Lynch could easily be put in charge of Coronation Street and anything Terry Gilliam touches is bound to veer towards the prosaic. But nothing had prepared me for Canadian director Guy Maddin. Quite simply, I’ve never…

A Dozen Summers

First thing to say is that to bring a full length feature film to screen on a total budget of £25,000 (no I haven’t missed off a nought) is a seriously impressive achievement. This is an ambitious and imaginative project which reflects particularly well on writer/director/star/song writer/factotum and father of the two leading ladies, Kenton…

P’tit Quinquin

For any lover oddball cinema Bruno Dumont stands as a beacon of sustained weirdness and his latest offering is no exception. It stitches together all four episodes of an unlikely hit French TV mini series into a sprawling 3hr 20 min of incomprehensibility. Set in a northern coastal farming community the film follows the hapless…

West

I had a bit of a headache as I began watching Chistian Schwochow’s account of Nelly (Jordis Triebel), an East German chemist and single mother who in 1978 is attempting to defect with her 8 year old son Alexej (Tristan Gobel) to West Berlin. Although she has the necessary papers there is tension and an…

The Act of Killing

Devastating and unbearable in equal measure, the ghosts of a million murdered souls seeped out of Joshua Openheimer’s nightmare account of the Indonesian purges of 1965. I left the screening more dispirited than I have felt since seeing The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Orphuls;  unable to talk, my cheeks soaked in silent tears.…