Julian Ross
Julian Ross 2010 Top Ten
My best-of-the-year list for DN, alongside my top ten Japanese films of 2010 for Midnight Eye, are my first submissions of best-of lists for any publication. I usually browse the internet at this time of the year, searching for other peoples’ lists to compare with mine, and I always get frustrated that most entries seemed [...]
Premiere Japan 2010: New Japanese Cinema
BAFTA and the Embassy of Japan, funded by the Japan Foundation, hosted their sixth mini-festival on contemporary Japanese cinema at BAFTA over the weekend. Renowned programmer and critic of East Asian cinema, Tony Rayns, and Japanese film-specialist Alexander Jacoby co-programmed a selection of films that had not yet reached English screens. There was a breadth [...]
Animal Kingdom
Deserved recipient of Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Jury Prize, Animal Kingdom is writer-director David Michôd’s impressively accomplished feature-length debut, though his shorts have apparently been causing ripples in the film festival circuit for a few years now. Loosely based on the Walsh Street police murders in 1988, Michôd takes the news story and turns [...]
LIFF2010: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
The surprise winner of the Palme d’Or earlier this year at Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives constitutes the final part of a multimedia project entitled Primitive. Thailand’s premier filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul initiated Primitive a couple of years ago as a quiet soliloquy for his local north-eastern region of Thailand [...]
LIFF2010: Tsai Ming-Liang
Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the key personalities of the international new wave of slow-cinema and a figure that has continuously strived to question the boundaries between film and other arts throughout his career. Although his work is often a nostalgic celebration of the cinema that was, his oeuvre, and particular his recent [...]
LIFF2010: Never Let Me Go
An adaptation of an acclaimed and beloved novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go paints a conceptually alternative world with a very familiar visual universe. The setting, at least visually, is the countryside in 1990s Britain, yet history is skewed into a parallel universe where clones are brought up from ‘birth’, only to have [...]
LIFF2010: Double Tide
A few weeks ago a review of Ruhr by James Benning was submitted as part of the coverage of the 54th London Film Festival, where I proposed Benning’s work as an extreme example of contemporary slow-cinema. Yet the six shots in Ruhr is overkill compared to Double Tide, where director Sharon Lockhart, friend and collaborator [...]
LIFF2010: A Town Called Panic
The first stop-motion animation to compete in Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, A Town Called Panic’s eccentric insanity is not what we have come to expect from Cannes’ selection, but perfectly fits the audience-friendly LIFF programme. Directed by the duo who created the Cravendale TV adverts, Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar breath life into plastic [...]
LIFF2010: Son of Babylon
Set only a few weeks into the wake of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Son of Babylon, winner of the Amnesty Film Award and Peace Prize at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival, follows young Ahmed and his grandmother, Um Ibrahim, who set out on a journey to find the father that he never [...]
LIFF2010: To Walk Beside You
Although it would be a stretch to denounce To Walk Beside You as a mistranslation of the original Japanese title, a direct translation would offer slightly different connotations; Kimi to arukou means I’ll walk with you. The fact is, there are no leaders amongst Yuya Ishii’s troupe of misguided loners, they require each others’ company [...]
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