Tony McKibbin

Don’t Look Now - Ed. Paul Newland

16 Jun 2010

(Intellect Press) Don’t Look Now is a work of low-key persuasion; it wants to convince us that seventies British cinema wasn’t an aesthetic dire strait, but a forking path of numerous possibilities. The decade may have given us film versions of On…

Eat, For This is My Body

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Michelange Quay, Haiti/France) 105min Quay’s semi-abstract look at colonial elements in Haiti is comparable to two 1980s touchstones, Marion Hänsel’s Dust and Claire Denis’ Chocolat. While there is an impressive opening shot that glides over the…

14 Kilometres (14 Kilometros)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

This issue-driven Spanish drama isn’t afraid to draw on several stock clichés of the well-trodden road movie genre. Three Africans undertake the arduous journey from Niger to Spain, crossing deserts, trying to get through corrupt border controls and…

State of the World

23 Aug 2007

Portmanteau films are always hard to pull off. After the carbohydrate rich, protein poor dish that was Paris, je t’aime, this six short film look at the state of the world is much more demanding. No film more so than Wang Bing’s Brutality Factory…

Manufacturing Dissent: Unconvering Michael Moore

23 Aug 2007

Is Michael Moore a self-regarding political liability who also screws with journalistic codes of conduct, or a wayward truth seeker who has no truck with compromise as he pursues fairness and justice? We probably didn’t need Deborah Melnyk and Rick…

I Served the King of England

16 Aug 2007

On paper this looks like a dream project. Major Czech ‘Prague Spring’ filmmaker Jirí Menzel adapts Bohumil Hrabal’s much loved comic novel and tries to recapture the delights of their earlier bittersweet 1966 collaboration, Closely Observed Trains. The…

The Man from London (A London férfi)

16 Aug 2007

Despite its troublesome and lengthy production history, Hungarian master auteur Béla Tarr’s newest film is another work of elegant despair. Closer to his 1988 film Damnation than the more recent Sátántangó or Werckmeister Harmonies in its length and…

Twisted Sister

(Ed Herzog, Germany, 2006) 94min

9 Aug 2007

Anna (Heike Makatsch) is an apparently successful thirty-something in the music industry, but when she takes a holiday in Spain with her timid younger sister, Marie (Anna Maria Mühe) she turns into a nightmare. Anna makes every event into a…