Jessica Kiang Festivals

Oct 22, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Leigh Singer |Sophia Satchell-Baeza

During the opening titles of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, the camera wanders over an old-fashioned mattress, striped in pale blue, with buttons holding its tufts of stuffing in place. On it is strewn a variety of midcentury-antique items that evoke not just the 1950s setting but the notorious life of William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation writer on whose novel it is based. There’s brown liquor, a typewriter, drug paraphernalia, a small arsenal of handguns.

Oct 8, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young

It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April, incredibly only her second film after her debut masterpiece Beginning (2020). The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief.

Sep 6, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Adam Nayman |Ginette Vincendeau

Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film FestivalIt’s hard to think of anything more dispiriting in Hollywood cinema right now, than the sight of a once-mighty star partnership running on the fumes of prior glories and reducing their previously buoyant on-and off-screen chemistry to the status of a laboured schtick.

Jun 7, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Nick James |Nick Bradshaw

Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A certain minority of viewers has at times imagined a version of Pretty Woman (1990) in which Richard Gere’s car does not pull up near Julia Roberts’ sensitive striver Vivian, but next to Laura San Giacomo’s Kit, Vivian’s salty, obscurely heartbreaking best friend. Perhaps director Sean Baker is one of us.

May 30, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Kim Newman |Neil Young

Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A person could lose their mind in Megalopolis. It sure seems like Francis Ford Coppola did, though ‘lose’ is maybe the wrong word, implying inadvertent mental misplacement.