A recent French comedy in the style of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It concerns a gay water polo team who are training up for the Gay Games in Croatia and are allocated a new trainer by the Swimming authorities. Matthias(Nicolás Gob)
is a veteran champion swimmer who makes a homophobic comment and as a sort of punishment is given this job. The team is, predictably, a motley crew
largely more interested in the social side but Matthias manages to work some miracles
and they head off to Croatia. The second part of the film is the Priscilla road movie part,
not too long thankfully as it is fairly easy to imagine what will happen.
The third part in Croatia blends scenes of the matches,
the partying at a sort of enormous bathhouse and the continuing stories and dramas of the group, especially that of the leader Jean (Alban Lenoir).
As usual, the film ends up being somewhat sweet and sour but is infused with loads of good humour, some appropriate messages and is slickly made.
Cedric Le Gallo and Maxime Govane are a good duo in direction and screenplay.
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Euridice dreams of being a concert pianist and her younger sister Guida just wants to have a good time. Guida bunks off to Greece with a sailor and Euridice is pressured into marrying a boring accountant by her conservative parents (very much so in that era).
Guida returns pregnant and is driven from the house with her parents lying and saying Euridice has gone to Vienna to become a concert pianist. The two girls try to write to each other but receive no replies and gradually give up hope of finding each other. Guida is eventually taken in by a kind woman called Filomena and brings up her son alone
and Euridice also has a child and slowly renounces her musical career. The patriarchal society and the oppression of women is clearly spelt out here.
and Carol Duarte are effective as the sisters and Barbara Santos as Filomena supports well. But the cameo at the end from Fernanda Montenegro, grand dame of Brazilian cinema lifts the film to another level.
of UN special envoy Sergio de Mello killed in an Al Qaeda bomb attack on the UN HQ in Iraq in 2003. It is something of a strange bird as it focuses a lot on the relationship Sergio had with Carolina Larriera
, a UN staffer at the time and sort of wraps his diplomatic experiences in East Timor, Cambodia and Iraq around that time.
Another part of the film focuses on the moments after the bomb hits and Sergio and his assistant Gil are agonising pinned under concrete in the debris. The whole film is a mish mash of flashbacks which in my opinion do the film little good. Of course, the subject matter is interesting: how he brokered peace in Timor with the Indonesians
and how his humanitarian decisions in Iraq actually made the HQ much more vulnerable. The screenplay tends to be labored and I felt a much better movie could have been made of all this material.
is sufficiently good to hold the centre of this movie with a sensitive performance and Ana de Armas keeps up with him as Carolina. Not bad given the wooden dialogue.
, a smalltime mafia chief in Datong, Shanxi and Qiao, his girlfriend. In the first part, Qiao is a sort of gangster moll,
protected by her boyfriend until he becomes vulnerable as is often the case when new guys come on the block. In a gripping scene featuring an attack on Bin in the street, Qiao fires an illegal gun
to stop the violence and is subsequently imprisoned.
5 years later she is released and goes off searching
for Bin who has gone to the Three Gorges area to work in a mine. She is a very different woman now, diffident but streetwise, seeking to rekindle the romance which seems to have gone out.
The scenes depicting life in Fengjie are fascinating. Finally, we return to the present in Datong where Qiao is living alone running her own betting shop. Bin returns, significantly weakened and aged.
(more consumerist, better transport, etc) and the contrast between the old and the new, present in The Farewell.
Fan Liao is all right as Bin but does not have the same opportunity to display the development of his character as does Qiao. Eric Gautier gives us realistic and haunting photography.
Soon after arriving he is drugged and mugged
and in the haze of the event seems to recall being witness to a murder.
Cameron (Sheldon Best) takes him in and helps him given that he has lost his wallet and bag but as the weekend wears on Joseph starts to have suspicions that Cameron or his mysteriously disappeared friend Rafael (Myles Clohessy)
are somehow connected to the murder. The noose starts tightening.
and the photography
The script reflects this, full of holes, mood swings between drugged tension to deep psychological conversations to silly gay teasing.
It doesn’t fit together. Nor is there any real motivation behind the bulk of the actions of the characters. Disappointingly slight.
all set in the city of Halle, which I don’t remember being the location for any major films in recent times.
raising the common issues of teenage coming out: the rumours in school, the bullying of other kids, the rejected girlfriend, the discriminatory parents and the first steps in gay sex with someone older
who just turns out to want a fling.
is convincing enough in the lead role and the work of his parents (Claudia Michelsen and Johannes von Bulow)
is good especially given the simplicity of much of the script. Photography attractive too.
No great shakes but gets the job done fairly credibly and succinctly.
The film takes place in La Guajira, the dry sandy desert peninsula in the north of the country bordering on Venezuela. The local tribes eke out a living herding and follow their traditional spiritual beliefs but when one of their group needs to raise money for a dowry,
he resorts to trading in marijuana with some foreigners along with another tribe who are in the area. The deal is successful, Rapayet (José Acosta) gets the girl
and a business is started which quickly becomes highly successful. The different branches of the tribe become rich but this brings with it jealousies
and headstrong actions and soon the protagonists find themselves sucked into a war between factions.
All of this is within the context of certain rules among the indigenous tribes which rule who can speak and decide in certain situations,
how wrongs can be made right and how and the question of listening to spirits who come to them in dreams or in the visits of birds. 
the elder of one tribe and staunch defender of her family is one of the stars here and the rest of the cast performs its parts effectively.
Photography by David Gallego is bright and captures this hot part of Colombia.
we can be grateful to Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego for bringing us this work.
is trying to remake his life after leaving prison, Jeff is an idiot savant incapable of doing anything right,
Alice is a nurse, coordinator of a support group
and worker in a soup kitchen, etc etc. They all seem to pass through a Russian restaurant at various moments run by Timofeyev, a fake Russian played by Bill Nighy.
to the point that you wonder what motivates them all. The first half seemed more like the stupidity of strangers. When you want to scream at the screen, don’t do it or get some professional help. We all know people who can’t seem to follow this advice but do we want a film about it? Lots of events like Clara’s court case
take place without any proper explanation and with strange telescoping of time and while a certain logic settles in towards the end, the overall result seems teased and unsatisfying. Zoe Kazan is irritating but effective as Clara and Andrea Riseborough shows her chameleonic talent as Alice. Tahar Rahim has presence in his role as Marc but seems unsure of who he is and it is only Bill Nighy who seems to have more fun rolling his eyes appropriately at times
. All rather a waste of talent.
he was doped and tricked into filming porn. Kyle, in turn, is employed by a couple of guys
who have made big money in dark web porn.
to keep the caller on the phone long enough to find out what really went on and what Danny plans to do. The rest is a series of flashbacks showing us what apparently happened.
, as much as the story and the setting show potential. As one reviewer said, a waste of good material. And a few points don’t tie up very well. All the same, the situation Danny found himself in is apparently more common than we know.
in the relatively desert-like north of Brazil suddenly changes into a gorefest in the middle and ends up having elements of a morality play and reflections about both history and the exploited past of Brazil. At the beginning we follow Teresa (Barbara Colen) back to her home village bringing back medicine from the city and returning for her grandmother’s funeral.
We see the local characters: Plinio (Wilson Rabelo), the patient school teacher, Domingas (Sonia Braga, unrecognisable)
the alcoholic doctor, Pacote (Thomas Aquino), a reformed gangster and others. After a while, strange things begin to happen, the GPS and internet fail and the locals can no longer locate Bacurau on the map, escaped horses pass through the village and the water truck is shot at. A posse going to see what is happening discovers dead bodies in the countryside. There are two other groups of players. Lunga,
another local gangster is camped out in a local silo controlling entrance to the area and fighting business interests exploiting the water locally. We see a corrupt and greasy local politician visit Bacurau with unsolicited gifts. And then there is a group of foreigners
who are at a sort of mercenary boot camp cum videogame in reality for tourists, led by the mad Michael (Udo Kier).
It also bears reflection as a comment on current conditions in Brazil.
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