Reviewed by Lee Hill The reissue of the rarely seen 1971 film, The Touch, Ingmar Bergman’s first collaboration with an American studio, is part of a retrospective now playing at the British Film Institute until the end of March. Whether seen separately or with other Bergman films (the BFI is also promoting Persona, The Seventh Seal and The Magic Flute), The Touch, despite its problematic history, confirms the director’s reputation…
Read MoreFilm Review: Loveless
Reviewed by Lee Hill For international audiences, Andrey Zvyagintsev is THE Russian director in the way that Andrei Tarkovsky was in the 80s. Since his astonishing debut in 2003, The Return, he has found a way to combine portraits of individuals in crisis with wider examinations of Russia’s inability to move away from totalitarianism. In his last two films, Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014), relationships between men and women are…
Read MoreFilm Review: The Mercy
Reviewed by Lee Hill In 1968, Donald Crowhurst, family man, struggling inventor and amateur sailor, was determined to boost the profile of a navigation device too ahead of its time. He decided to enter the Golden Globe, an around the world race sponsored by The Sunday Times. Despite not having sailed beyond the coast of Devon and struggling to keep his tiny company going, Crowhurst felt the risk was worth…
Read MoreFilm Review: Native
Reviewed by Lee Hill For an independent filmmaker, a first feature, without access to the near unlimited technical and financial resources of a major production entity or studio, is always a gamble. It is one thing for a new director and company to argue that “less is more”, but another thing entirely to pull off this aesthetic if one small, but significant aspect of the project misfires. It’s no surprise…
Read MoreFilm Review: Brad’s Status
Reviewed by Lee Hill Ben Stiller is Brad Sloan, a Generation Xer suffering from a serious case of mid-life crisis blues. On the surface, Brad seems to have a pretty good life in suburban Sacramento. He is married to an attractive loving wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer) works in the California state legislature, while Brad runs a small NGO that links worthy charities to philanthropists. Their only child, Troy (Austin Abrams),…
Read MoreFilm Review: Bingo: The King of Mornings
Reviewed by Lee Hill “My makeup is dry and it cracks round my chin / I’m drowning my sorrows in whiskey and gin,” The Kinks sang on their 1967 hit single, The Death of a Clown, and that in many ways sums up the theme of Bingo: The King of Mornings. Audiences love a tale of the clown that cries on the inside. Bingo is the slickly executed directorial debut…
Read MoreBest Films Of 2017 By Lee Hill
1-Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch) More than just a revival of a cult TV show, this was an 18-hour feature as mysterious, surreal and heartbreaking as Mulholland Drive and perhaps the closest a filmmaker has come to the novelistic reach of Gravity’s Rainbow or John Updike’s Rabbit books since RW Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Read MoreFilm Review: Happy End
Reviewed by Lee Hill Earlier this year, Michael Haneke lost out on a possible third Palme D’Or for his latest film, Happy End. In the hothouse and often clubby critical atmosphere of the festival, some commentators dismissed the film as a “greatest hits” package. The big prize was won by Ruben Östlund for The Square, a younger director who shares Haneke’s preoccupations with modern anxiety, the shaky moral and intellectual…
Read MoreFilm Review: Brakes
Reviewed by Lee Hill One of the pleasures of regular film going is seeing a favorite actor or actress in a striking cameo or supporting role. Such appearances add immeasurably to the mix of a great film and can salvage or redeem fare one might dismiss or simply forget. Brakes, the self-produced directorial debut of Mercedes Grower, who has appeared in films like Sixteen and Revolver as well as TV…
Read MoreFilm Review: Manifesto
Reviewed by Lee Hill Manifesto walks a fine line between the art house circuit and the museum. The resulting feature began life as a 2015 installation by visual artist Julian Rosenfeldt and Cate Blanchett. Its purpose is to restore the original shock, boldness and honesty of various manifestos – political, literary, cinematic, social, etc. To achieve the goal of restoring radical, epoch altering energy to words that have, for better…
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