La Verónica centres on social media star and footballer’s wife Verónica (Mariana Di Girólamo). Her persistent efforts to procure a sponsorship deal could be derailed by re-surfaced murder charges concerning an infant. Director Leonardo Medel frames the entire film in medium close-up with Verónica’s face in the centre. This conceit hinges on the idea that…
A pleasantly distracting comedy, Rosa’s Wedding centres around a hard-working woman who’s selfless to the point of exhaustion. She looks after everyone – family and friends all – other than herself. About to turn 45, Rosa (Candela Peña) works long hours as a seamstress in the wardrobe department of a film production company in Valencia….
Perfumes is a gently paced, delightfully nuanced French comedy about a woman with a nose for fragrances. Anne Walberg (Emmanuelle Devos) was employed by Dior, where she created some of the world’s most popular perfumes. But now she works for an assortment of contract clients, often trying to find ways to mask undesirable smells. She…
Sebastián’s Borensztein’s Heroic Losers is a feel-good comedy set in a small Argentinian community in the early 2000s. Fermin Perlassi (Ricardo Darin) and his wife, Lidia (Veronica Llinas), decide they will take over an abandoned grain store facility and form a cooperative. Doing so will require financial input from many of the locals who are…
Not to be confused with the so-so 2014 supernatural themed thriller starring Eric Bana, Deliver Us From Evil is a frenetic and violent hard-boiled action thriller from Korean director Won-Chang Hong (who wrote films like The Yellow Sea). It delivers plenty of action and will delight fans of this genre. Korean action cinema seems to…
French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert displays her comedic side in Jean-Paul Salomé’s crime caper The Godmother (La Daronne). The film starts out as a conventional crime drama with the cops looking to intercept a shipment of drugs, but ends up in some pretty wild territory. Huppert plays Patience Portefeux*, a translator with the Paris police….
The German Film Festival brings the best new films from Germany showcasing festival favourites, works of auteurs and the best new talent. This year’s program, presented in association with German Films, kicks off from 25 May at Palace Cinemas across the nation. Opening night is Next Door, the darkly comic directorial debut by Daniel Brühl…
Pablo Larraín is a Chilean filmmaker of distinctive style. Much loved in art house circles, his films are often marked by slow narratives punctuated by arresting visuals – and occasionally violence. His latest film to reach these shores, Ema (actually made in 2019) follows a similar pattern. Larraín’s Jackie (2016) was one of my favourite…
Raja (Mariya Belkin) and Victor Frankel (Vladimir Friedman), a couple in their 60s, were the unsung heroes of Russian cinema. For several decades they had dubbed Hollywood epics into Russian for cinema audiences. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the couple left Russia and migrated to Israel. But like thousands of…
The astounding Romanian documentary Collective exposes corruption on a scale I haven’t seen. The immorality reaches into the highest echelons of the health system, killing patients who would otherwise survive. This happened recently – in October 2015 to be more precise – and it took an investigative reporter, Catalin Tolontan, and two of his colleagues,…
