Jafar Pahani’s 3 Faces escapes the confines of the director’s home (This Is Not a Film) and even Tehran (Taxi) as the recording of a young girl’s apparent suicide spurs him, and celebrated Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari, to take a odyssey…
Transit Movie Review | VIFF 2018
What if purgatory was a Gestapo police state in contemporary Marseilles? Once again, Christian Petzold’s romantic waltz of Hollywood dreamscape and grounded emotional reality is not so much a distracting contrivance in the case of Transit as a compelling abstraction.…
The Image Book Movie Review | VIFF 2018
There’s a moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book where the forerunner of Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) takes home footage of a young girl who—perhaps for the first time in her life—watches an incoming train coming to a station.…
Movie Review: Tragedy Girls
The opening scene in Tragedy Girls seems an unabashed patchwork of ‘80s horror. Parked on a lonely stretch of road at night two lovers hear something strange outside the car. The girl suggests to the guy that he go and…
VIFF Review: Happy End
To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. The opening few moments of Michael Haneke’s newest button-pusher Happy End leaves a few open-ended questions—the one I’m most eager to talk about involves a possible animal rights violation. Of course, animal torture…
VIFF 2017: “Western”, “Bad Genius” & “Sami Blood”
To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. One quick scroll through any news site is enough to tell you how engrossed the human species is in conflict—this is also reflected in popular entertainment, whether its the fiction portrayed on screens or…
VIFF Review: BPM (Beats Per Minute)
To read previous VIFF coverage, click here. In the electric first half of BPM (Beats Per Minute) the film charts the movement of a group of HIV/AIDS activists in France in the early 1990s, just as the virus became a…