THE DAVID PARKINSON FILM BLOG

(Reviews of Familiar Touch; and Killing Anna) FAMILIAR TOUCH. Given that Sarah Friedland's Familiar Touch won the Best Director prize in the Orizzonti sidebar at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, as well as its Luigi de Laurentis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature. it seems odd that it has taken almost two years for it to reach UK screens. However, its arrival confirms that Friedland has continued to make a remarkable transition from choreography to directing after

(Reviews of Kapodistrias; Merrily We Roll Along; and Time and Water) KAPODISTRIAS. History is impossible to replicate on screen. The best a viewer can hope for is an honest presentation of the facts. But this rarely happens, as the re-creators of the past always have a point to make or an angle to exploit. Even the best historical biopics reflect the preconceptions and preoccupations of their writer, director, and/or producer. There will always be omissions, distortions, and

(Reviews of Enzo; Köln 75; Bonnie & Clive;; and Acting) ENZO. Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo go back a long way. Having edited Cantet's Les Sanguinaires (1997) and Human Resources (1999), Campillo served as his co-writer/editor on Time Out (2001), Heading South (2005), The Class (2006), and Foxfire (2012) before he edited Return to Ithaca (2014) and co-wrote The Workshop (2017). So, when the cancer that killed him prevented Cantet from starting work on Nino, it was natural

(Reviews of Illusione; Leonora in the Morning Light; and No Place For Football) ILLUSIONE. At the outset of her directorial career, Francesca Archibugi had a love affair with the Donatello Awards. She won Best New Director with her feature bow, Mignon Has Come to Stay (1988), and Best Film with both Towards Evening (1990) and The Great Pumpkin (1993). The major awards might have dried up, but Archibugi has remained one of Italy's most respected film-makers, with dramas like W

(Reviews of Hen; Eagles of the Republic; The Christophers; The Balloonists; and Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass) HEN. Following in the hoofprints of Jerzy Skolimowski's EO (2022), György Pálfi's Hen presents the world from an animal's perspective. British audiences haven't seen much of the Hungarian director after he started out so impressively with Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006). In the intervening 20 years, Pálfi has produced five features: I Am Not Your Friend (2009)

(Reviews of Northern Soul: Still Burning; and Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People)) NORTHERN SOUL: STILL BURNING. Few local phenomena have been fawned over as much as Northern Soul. Since ace musicologist Tony Palmer rocked up in town best known for Rugby League to film ` The Wigan Casino' for Granada's This England programme in 1977, there has been a glut of nostalgic remembrances. Following John D. Moore's The Way of the Crowd (2004), Wayne Allen and Alan Byron made such

(Reviews of Romería; and Our Land) ROMERÍA. Having impressed with on debut with Summer 1993 (2017) and won the Golden Bear at Berlin for Alcarràs (2022), Catalan director Carla Simón returns with Romería. Taking its title from the Spanish word for `pilgrimage', this is another obviously autobiographical work and could be seen as a spiritual sequel to Simón's neophyte recollection of her childhood. Once again displaying an intuitively evocative sense of place, this is a deeply

(Reviews of Wild Foxes; Olivia; Power to the People: John & Yoko in NYC; Ada: My Mother the Architect - ALSO; Departures; Surviving Earth; and Ultras) WILD FOXES. As a recent BFI Southbank season demonstrated, film-makers have found boxing an irresistible subject. Indeed, cinema owes the sport a good deal, as the Latham brothers invented a loop that prevented celluloid strips from tearing in the camera/projector (and, thus, enabled longer films), in order to shoot The Corbett

(Reviews of Rose of Nevada; Exit 8; Gioia mia; The North; and London's Last Wilderness) ROSE OF NEVADA. Even for its most ardent admirers, Enys Men (2022) felt anticlimactic after the brilliance of Mark Jenkin's debut feature, Bait (2019). The Cornish auteur continues to put his distinctive artisanal avant-garde stamp on genre cinema with Rose of Nevada, on which he serves as his own writer, 16mm cinematographer, editor, composer, and post-production sound designer. Working w

(Reviews of Miroirs No.3; Diamanti; The Wizard of the Kremlin; Kinaestheria; and Time Hoppers: The Silk ROad) MIROIRS No.3. Taking its title from a piano piece by Maurice Ravel, Christian Petzold's Miroirs No.3 is the latest of the Berlin School director's films to be set against the backdrop of a stifling summer. Unlike The State I Am In (2000), Jerichow (2008), Barbara (2012), and Afire (2023), however, the twist in the tale is not so closely guarded, with the result t

(Reviews of Dracula; The Stranger; Undertone; and Being Ola) DRACULA. Radu Jude is by far the most interesting film-maker currently working anywhere in the world. Since making his feature debut with The Happiest Girl in the World (2009), he has attempted a psychological thriller ( Everybody in Our Family , 2012), a Western ( Aferim! , 2015), a period drama ( Scarred Hearts , 2016), a bleak comedy ( I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians , 2018), a political bio

(Reviews of Kim Novak's Vertigo; McCartney: The Hunt For the Lost Bass; D Is For Distance; Two Women; and Empire of Lies) KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO. It's not often that a ghost is thanked in a film's credits. But the closing crawl of Alexandre O. Philippe's Kim Novak's Vertigo makes it clear that the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock was `undeniably present during the making of this movie'. This is the latest of the Swiss American documentarist's screen studies, following the likes of Ea

(Reviews of Two Prosecutors; Orwell: 2+2=5; Underland; Redoubt; and No Ordinary Heist) TWO PROSECUTORS. Such has been the provocative excellence of such documentaries as Maidan (2012), The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016), The Trial (2018), State Funeral (2019), Baba Yar, Context (2021), and The Kiev Trial (2022) that it's easy to forget that Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has also made such impactful fictional films as My Joy (2010), In the Fog (2012), A Gentle C

(Reviews of Trains; Dead Man's Wire; Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't; Dead Lover; Abode; Apnas; The Land of Sometimes; and The Last Supper) TRAINS. Among the first images ever projected on to a cinema screen was the arrival of a steam locomotive at a station on the Mediterranean coast. Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) falls outside the purview of Maciej J. Drygas's Trains , an archival documentary about 20th-century steam trav

(Reviews of La Grazia; The Tasters; Broken English; and One Last Deal) LA GRAZIA. Director Paolo Sorrentino and actor Toni Servillo have formed one of the great partnerships in modern cinema history. Each made his debut with L'uomo in più/One Man Up (2001), with Servillo playing an ageing crooner. He was a lonely businessman with Mafia connections in Le conseguenze dell'amore/The Consequences of Love (2004) and a grasping money lender in L'amico di famigli/The Family Friend

(Review of Exhibition on Screen: Turner & Constable) EXHIBITION ON SCREEN: TURNER & CONSTABLE. As the marvellous Exhibition on Screen series moves towards its 40th title, it comes as a surprise to discover that only two previous entries have been dedicated to British artist. However, David Hockney At The Royal Academy of Arts (2017) and Lucian Freud: A Self Portrait (2020) are now joined by Turner & Constable , which explores the acclaimed Tate Britain show, `Rivals and Ori

(Reviews of La Bohème; The King's Warden; and Dolly) LA BOHÈME. An English graduate from Hertford College, Oxford and a former Artist in Residence at the Oxford Playhouse, Robin Norton-Hale has made her name as the founder and the Artistic Director of OperaUpClose. She has produced English updates of several operas and makes her directing debut for the screen with an adaptation of the 2009 stage reworking of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème that earned Norton-Hale an Olivier Awar

(Reviews of Sirāt; The Spin; Little Amélie; and All You Need Is Kill) SIRĀT. Having made three shorts in the mid-2000s,French-born Galician director, Óliver Laxe, established his reputation with a trio of distinctive features. Now, he has followed You All Are Captains (2010), Mimosas (2016), and Fire Will Come (2019) with Sirāt , which takes its title from the Arabic word for hair-thin, but razor sharp bridge between Heaven and Hell. In addition to winning the Jury Prize a

(Review of Man on the Run; and Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare; The Forbidden City) MAN ON THE RUN. `Stuck inside these four walls,' are the key words to understanding the Paul McCartney profiled in Morgan Neville's documentary, Man on the Run . He had first felt confined in Rishikesh in the spring of 1968 and then again during the recording of `The White Album', when he had annoyed John Lennon and George Harrison by recording certain tracks on his own. To avoid the walls clos

(Reviews of The President's Cake; Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up; and Stitch Head) THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE. The winner of the Caméra d'or at Cannes for Best First Feature, Hasan Hadi's The President's Cake is based on the director's own experience of life in the Mesopotamian marshes under Saddam Hussein. It numbers Chris Columbus and Marielle Heller among its executive producers. Yet, despite such Hollywood input, this feels to have more in common Iranian Majid Majidi'