The ironically-titled Entertainment plays hard on the expectation that a cinema audience requires something redeeming in its anti-heroes. The film is an extension of Greg Turkington’s stand-up-as-performance-art project ’Neil Hamburger’, a greasy peddler of puerile one-liners and vile, hateful patter (Turkington co-wrote the screenplay with Tim Heidecker and director Rick Alverson). In (…) Continue Reading »

Between 1999 and the year 2000, Agnès Varda took a digital camera around France filming gleaners – “glaner,” Varda’s voiceover says over shots of the encyclopaedia entry, “to gather after the harvest.” The original gleaners, made famous in rustic paintings of the 19th century, gathered left-over corn; in Varda’s film we meet the specialist gatherers of unwanted potatoes, grapes, furniture, (…) Continue Reading »

The BFI has just re-released ‘Love is the Devil’ on Blu-Ray. First released in 1998, this is a film portraying the destructive relationship between Francis Bacon and his muse and lover, George Dyer. The film culminates in Dyer’s suicide on the eve of one of Bacon’s triumphs, an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. Just as Dyer drops seemingly from nowhere into Francis Bacon’s (…) Continue Reading »

Carlyle plays the titular role of socially inept barber in his entertaining directorial debut, based on the first of a series of novels by Douglas Lindsay. The film kicks off with two seemingly unrelated stories unfolding in Glasgow; awkward and (…) Continue Reading »

This isn’t ’the story’ of how women got the vote. Nor is it a tale of how activists shocked the nation with their efforts to obtain suffrage for women. This is a snippet view of one (fictional) woman’s experience in a militant cell of white suffrage activists, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. But you’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema without realising that these women are (…) Continue Reading »

Stories of our Lives is a sequence of five tales sourced from real life experiences of gay Kenyans. The film uses the same crisp, saturated black and white photography across its five sections. Even though this creates a flattening of visual tone, the films-within-the-film each have a different feel. ‘Ask me Nicely’ is briskly punctuated by a school bell but its scenes are also divided by (…) Continue Reading »

Also released under ’Alda and Maria’, the inspiration for the feature film was director Pocas Pascoal’s own life (see interview here) and the need for Angolan migrants to tell their stories. Of course, this is the reflection of a woman looking back as a migrant forced from home by war and conscription, but it tells the larger story of nationalism and identity. The story begins with (…) Continue Reading »

I almost didn’t watch Ayanda as the synopsis described the title character as an Afro-hipster. Did that really need a racial qualifier in South Africa? Why is the racial default for hipsters white? Things will never change if we keep normalising whiteness. Nevertheless, I’m glad I moved past it as the film has something to say about family and the agency to dream. The adage ’it takes money (…) Continue Reading »

In 2014, Sight & Sound asked 340 critics, programmers, and filmmakers to name the best documentaries ever made. This autumn, in partnership with Sight & Sound and Open City Docs, DocHouse is running a season of ‘Filmmakers’ Favourites’, inviting award-winning documentary filmmakers to present their choices from the poll. Director Brian Hill (Songbirds [2007], The Confessions of Thomas (…) Continue Reading »

The Bristol Radical Film Festival returns for its fourth edition. It has partnered up with the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first ever Festival of Independent British Cinema. The festival, a milestone in (…) Continue Reading »