Director Gurinder Chadha who is known for the film Bend It Like Beckham, has created another feel-good film. Blinded by Light is about a Pakistani British teenager Javed who learns how to cope with the ecstacy and heartbreak of life through the music of Bruce Springsteen. Set in a working class suburb of London in…
Framing delinquent youth as hopeless cases is a common narrative ploy by a ruthless and shallow media. There’s the assumption that youths are going to gather together in gangs, commit crimes and cause havoc. Director Catherine Scott has thrown a fresh bucket of water on an old stereotype. Just as she did in her other…
*Contains no plot spoilers 4.5 stars Readers of this blog will know that I do love Polish culture and Polish films. Here’s another great Polish film that has come out recently and is currently nominated for an Oscar for best international feature film. Corpus Christi, or Boże Ciało as it’s known in Polish, is a black…
Here are some films that have held my imagination captive for a long time after seeing them this summer. Along with a few other films that I regret seeing and wish I could have the time back. * Contains no spoilers
I saw this one at this year's NZIFF in Wellington. Directed by Claire Denis, High Life is about a group of prisoners who are used as guinea pigs in sexual experiments by an evil nurse played by Juliette Binoche on board a space mission. I don’t normally speak in such plain terms about the plot…
Are you someone who blocks your ears when you hear the emergency services drive past? Are you someone who gets freaked out in crowds? Do you seem to intuit and understand other people and all of their problems in a very sophisticated way, without really trying? Do you easily take on the energy of other…
The epic post-punk British road movie nobody has ever heard of Made in England in 1979 at the height of post-punk, this is a very unique film. It's like what Joy Division would have looked like if the band's music was made into a film. This is also a unique British film because it's a…
One of my favourite films of all time is the Wim Wenders film The Wings of Desire known in German as Der Himmel uber Berlin. It won the Best Film at Cannes in 1987. Some of the magic of this film comes from the music (Nick Cave, U2), the acting (Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin) and…
Continue reading ➞ Poetry and music from the film ‘Wings of Desire’ (Der Himmel uber Berlin)
* Contains no plot spoilers This is a fun, glamorous, art-heist caper in anime. If that makes sense. Directed by Slovenian Milorad Krstić, it features tiny love letters to his home country in the finer details of the film. And this is a film of beautifully rendered and amusing details. The animation is just awe-inspiring…
Utopia is veteran and respected journalist John Pilger’s attempt to tell an extraordinary story, one hidden from the eyes of everyday Australians, of Australia’s first people. Pilger uses words like apartheid and hidden genocide to describe it. And the evidence he presents in this documentary is overwhelmingly convincing. It’s difficult to do justice to this…
Continue reading ➞ Film Review – Utopia directed by John Pilger
This feel-good documentary is set in Reykjavík, Iceland on corner of Ásvallagata and Blómvallagata streets. Where there is a little unassuming grocery store called simply Kjötborg or Corner Shop. Two brothers own and run the local shop, which they inherited from their parents. This is the last bastion of stores like this, as many others…
Another film that featured at the New Zealand International Film Festival was The Distant Barking of Dogs. It’s the story of a young boy and his family who live on the Ukrainian and Russian border, on a slice of disputed land that is being fought over tooth and nail, for years. The people in this…
I saw this film at the recent New Zealand International Film Festival. The festival has grown and developed over the years and has become quite a magical event. I thoroughly recommend it if you are in Auckland. Ancient Woods is a Lithuanian production and it’s a magical foray into the flora and fauna living in…
Paweł Pawlikowski directed and wrote this love story that’s set in the 1960’s. This film is unlike any other Polish film I’ve ever seen and I mean that as a compliment. That’s because it has more in common with one of these cool French New Wave films of the 1960’s – Bande A Parte or…
Roland was a goliath 4,000 pound sea elephant (A.K.A an Elephant Seal Mirunga patagonica. He lived in Berlin Zoo from the late 1920's until his death during the second world war. Here he is getting a snow bath from his handler at the Berlin Zoo (date unknown) In this film you can see his large…
Continue reading ➞ Roland: Gargantuan Elephant Seal Of Berlin Zoo
In this stunning short film called Sun Moon London by filmmaker Luke Miller, we witness otherworldly visions of the interplay of the moon, sun and bustling central London. Luke captured the harvest moon on the 5th of October 2017, when the moon was at its zenith of autumnal equinox. Along with footage of the 1st…
Continue reading ➞ Short film: Celestial wonders in downtown London
In this mind-bending short film, US designer John Edmark, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, uses 3D printing, the mathematics of the golden ratio and photography tricks to create moving symmetry - a bloom. [The] animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ). This is the same golden ratio…
Continue reading ➞ Short film: 3D printed blooms and the golden ratio
【360° Movie】Tokyo Light Odyssey (Full) from WOW inc on Vimeo. If Pink Floyd and Stanley Kubrik were to have a baby in 2017 - this is what it would look like. Be taken on a sublime journey of immersive 360 degree Tokyo in a most unsettling mood. The immersive short film is filled with the…
Continue reading ➞ 360 degree VR film of Tokyo: A hyper-creepy and darkly enjoyable feast
The Wings of Desire (1987) (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987) Is a Wim Wenders cult film that follows invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of the human inhabitants and comfort those who are in distress. Immensely moving it delves into the human condition and all of the pain, memory…
Continue reading ➞ The top 13 intense and powerful films that will linger with you forever
Marek Gibney is the creator of the Music Map, the Film Map, the Tech Gadget Map, the Art Map and the Book Map. These ingenious web based apps allow you to get recommendations on books, music, films and art by typing in your favourite artists. It's sort of like a cooler and less annoying version…
Continue reading ➞ <3 The Internet: Get music, book, art and film recommendations
The other night Terrence Malick's new film Voyage of Time: Life's Journey screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival Autumn events in Auckland. Although I've found Malick's films a little too long and ponderous, this one I enjoyed more than his others because of its sparseness and its lack of human narrative and human characters.…
Continue reading ➞ Film Review: Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey (2016) Terrence Malick
Many people lament the death of 'real cinema' and 'real films' because of the number of people now downloading films illegally. This means that the investment into film is jeopardised by piracy. Although the same was said about cinema being dead when Television first came out as well, right? Could streaming TV and films be…
Continue reading ➞ 100 film classics of the new century selected by 177 film critics
