Steven Soderbergh’s swan song will face off against the latest efforts by Roman Polanski, Asghar Farhadi, Nicolas Winding Refn, Alexander Payne, and the Coen brothers at the 66th Cannes Film Festival. The lineup reveals which pictures will compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or, collected last year by Michael Haneke’s Amour. Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra […]
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Holiday road – The Loneliest Planet review
April 8, 2013 
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By Simon Miraudo April 8, 2013 Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are marvellous – and marvellously comfortable with one another – as Alex and Nica in Julia Loktev‘s dark travelogue, The Loneliest Planet. The first half of the feature sees their engaged couple wander, almost aimlessly, across Georgia (the one near Russia, and not […]
Read moreInterview: Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet)
April 8, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo April 8, 2013 Writer-director Julia Loktev warns that her film The Loneliest Planet is a “dangerous” date movie. In it, an engaged couple played by Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal roam Georgia’s picturesque Caucasus Mountains. Though madly in love one another, they are confronted with a life-threatening situation that completely changes […]
Read moreSydney Film Festival unveils first batch of films for 2013
April 4, 2013 0 Comments
The first batch of titles headed to the 2013 Sydney Film Festival have been unveiled on the SFF’s official website. A couple of the pictures were expected by arthouse aficionados to make the cut, including Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut Stoker (which was delayed from its original March release date to instead debut at the fest), and Noah Baumbach’s […]
Read moreTalking cure – The Patience Stone review
March 25, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo March 25, 2013 Are the navel-gazing antics of HBO’s Girls less significant than the tortured trials undertaken by the unnamed Afghan woman in Atiq Rahimi‘s The Patience Stone? Well, yes, obviously. But do the gravity of those trials make the latter automatically a more worthwhile work? Not necessarily. Rahimi’s dramatically inert Patience […]
Read moreSnow black and white – Blancanieves review
March 18, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo March 18, 2013 Blancanieves is the third adaptation of the Snow White fable we’ve seen in just 12 months. Though it’s been a boon for the little people acting guilds, audiences are surely starting to tire of seeing the same story over and over again (one that’s been ingrained in them since […]
Read moreThe non-existent charm of the bourgeoisie – What’s in a Name review
March 4, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo March 4, 2013 Guess who’s coming to dinner? No one you’d reasonably want to spend time with in real life! Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte‘s What’s in a Name is a murderously unfunny French farce that could have only had a happy ending if the central characters were poisoned to […]
Read moreInterview: David Petrarca (Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, True Blood)
February 21, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo February 21, 2013 “I look at the networks as dinosaurs standing in the tar pits; they’re just waiting to fall over.” So says David Petrarca, one of the television industry’s go-to directors. Over the past decade, he’s had a front-row seat to the medium’s extraordinary evolution. Having helmed episodes of hit HBO […]
Read moreThe medium is the message – No review
February 18, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo February 18, 2013 It’s the rare movie that celebrates marketing minds. Even the heroes of TV’s Mad Men are presented as having questionable professional ethics, what with their uncanny ability to peddle cigarettes and their willingness to promote such blights on U.S. culture as Richard Nixon and jai alai. Pablo Larraín‘s No […]
Read moreThis prison of ours – Caesar Must Die review
February 11, 2013 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo February 11, 2013 The continued relevance of William Shakespeare’s work more than 400 years after it was originally written is an impressive feat of prophetic penmanship, to say the least. Who, from this day and age, could possibly compare? I daresay E.L. James will unlikely set future generations alight with her BDSM […]
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