Sight & Sound

Flights of fantasy: Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival 2018

Though it may not aspire to the highest critical standards in its programming, South Korea’s second international film festival screens the fantasy genre hits which many ‘proper’ festivals don’t deign to, reports Tony Rayns.   

Festivals

Surreal16: the filmmaking collective trying to forge a new identity for Nigerian cinema

At the seventh annual Africa International Film Festival in Lagos, Tega Okiti speaks to the Surreal16 collective about their intention to create artistically minded films that move away from the reigning imperialism of Nollywood aesthetics and production practices.

Interviews

Locarno first look: Too Late to Die Young depicts a country coming of age

Set in the aftermath of the Pinochet regime, Dominga Sotomayor’s accomplished third film explores different generations adapting to new freedoms and an uncertain future, writes Josh Slater-Williams.

Reviews and recommendations

Locarno first look: Diane is a triumph of decency over despair

Kent Jones makes his fiction debut with this warm and very astute portrait of a widow in a small town, grappling with a difficult son and the fragility of life as she ages, writes Paul O’Callaghan.

Reviews and recommendations

Locarno first look: Yara celebrates innocence and young love

Abbas Fahdel’s gentle film sets a teenage romance in a sun-kissed farm in the mountains of northern Lebanon, writes John Bleasdale.

Reviews and recommendations

Locarno first look: Suburban Birds forges magical links between generations

A group of adult engineers and another of playful children tread the same ground in Qiu Sheng’s impressive debut feature, in which the company we keep tilts the world on its axis, writes John Bleasdale.

Reviews and recommendations

Locarno first look: Alice T. is a flawed tale of teenage pregnancy

Radu Muntean’s latest drama follows a rebellious daughter and her distraught mother through a crisis, but fails to convince us to believe in their delicate dynamic, writes James Lattimer.

Reviews and recommendations

Film of the week: Sicilian Ghost Story is a chilling vision of lost youth

Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s hypnotic mystery film about a teenage girl stalking her missing lover into a dream world is as beguiling as it is bleak, writes Pamela Hutchinson.

Reviews and recommendations

Nathaniel Dorsky’s Arboretum Cycle: the photosynthesis of film

The artist-filmmaker captures a rare sculptural quality of light in his latest work, which comprises seven films of plant life in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, plunging the audience into the undergrowth, writes Matt Turner.

Features

Ant-Man and The Wasp review: miniaturised Marvel caper wins on zing

For a character on the fringes of the Cinematic Universe, Paul Rudd’s shrinking superhero has some impressive smarts – even if this sequel doesn’t always take flight, writes Adam Nayman.

Reviews and recommendations

Mission: Impossible – Fallout review: Tom Cruise defies gravity (and age)

The actor refuses to hang it up in the sixth Mission Impossible film, a movie thin in plot but packed with astonishing visuals and thrilling action sequences, writes Henry K. Miller. 

Reviews and recommendations

Film of the week: Apostasy presents a family’s painful crisis of faith

Mother and daughters are torn apart by religion in Daniel Kokotajlo’s assured debut, a potent drama about life in a tight-knit community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, writes Nikki Baughan.

Reviews and recommendations

Maurice archive review: Merchant Ivory’s double love story “would give E.M. Forster great pleasure”

To celebrate the restoration and re-release of James Ivory and Ismael Merchant’s gay education sentimentale, we reprint Claire Tomalin’s glowing review of a film she found to be faithful to the joy and pain of its source novel.

Reviews and recommendations

Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Doc/Visions 2018: changing tides in documentary cinema

Nonfiction film is in a fascinating state of flux right now, as the creative programming at Sheffield this year revealed, with many titles expanding our ideas about cinematic reality, reports Ben Nicholson.

Features

Strongmen take all at Karlovy Vary 2018

Three studies of mighty male monsters won the three top prizes at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Sign of the times, asks Jessica Kiang.

Festivals

Access: Sheffield Doc/Fest

How to be a documentary filmmaker in the UK? It’s all about what hotel bar you know, video-essays Charlie Lyne.

Video

Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s fascination with female experience and emotions underpinned one of the cinema’s greatest virtual communities of women on screen. In this video study Leigh Singer invites Bergman’s talented actresses and their creations into closest possible correspondence.

Video

In her eyes: notes on Gloria Grahame (a video essay)

With a curl of her lip and an arch of her eyebrow, Gloria Grahame was the actress who stood up to both Humphrey Bogart and Lee Marvin in their most violent roles. In this video essay, Serena Bramble explores the burn mark Grahame left on the silver screen.

Video

Video essay: What is neorealism?

kogonada pits the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind on the same movie material.

Video