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4 days ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
It is no surprise that this film has won two awards, one of them being an audience award. Filmed in the city of Austin in Texas, this is a work of enormous human appeal being a story of struggle and determination not to give up. It is these positive qualities that drive the film regardless of the fact that it offers an illustration of the extent to which women who have been sexually abused can find it absurdly difficult to obtain justice.
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1 week ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
This highly unusual film offers a decidedly interior drama which plays out in a setting which could not be more vividly and authentically realised. The filmmaker is a Belgian, Leonardo Van Dijl, who directs what is his first feature from a screenplay which he wrote with Ruth Becquart who also contributes by taking on a subsidiary acting role.
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1 week ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
This film comes as a complete surprise. It is one of the most daringly ambitious and original films of the year but you would never anticipate that since what we have here is a documentary about sailing. Admittedly its focus is a novel one because it is concerned with people who choose to take to the water in vessels that have no engines. However, what makes Wind, Tide & Oar extraordinary is not its subject matter as such but what the filmmaker, Huw Wahl, seeks to do with it.
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1 week ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
Early in 2021 I reviewed Beginning the first feature by the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili and hailed it as a work which both technically and aesthetically was truly remarkable. She now offers its successor, April, and it is equally worthy in that regard, if not indeed superior. However, she also writes her own screenplays and April no less than Beginning is a work in which the storytelling often leaves one puzzled.
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2 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
The distinguished Irish writer Edna O'Brien died on 27th July 2024 aged 93. Fortunately, it was well ahead of that when Sinéad O'Shea put in hand this film about O’Brien's life and career. Consequently, one of the key elements on screen here is the footage of O'Brien herself reminiscing for the film. This interview took place mainly in 2023, was interrupted when she was taken into hospital but was then resumed in April 2024.
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2 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
To some degree it would seem that the terms wilding and rewilding are interchangeable and that makes it all the more important to stress that this new documentary by Matthew R. Brady is quite distinct in character from the highly popular 2023 film Wilding. That earlier piece concentrated on the concept of wilding being applied by Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell to their estate at Knepp in West Sussex whereas the focus of this new work is anything but localised.
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2 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
Born in Lisbon in 1972, Miguel Gomes is a filmmaker who is clearly an artist in the sense that all of his films are personal expressions, works that speak for him. Such people often write their own screenplays but it is a feature of Gomes's work that he has colleagues who regularly make their own contributions, writers such as Telmo Churro, Mariana Ricardo and Maureen Fazendeiro. All were involved in Grand Tour and Churro not for the first time also had a role in the editing of it.
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2 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
Had this been a film about Gordon Ramsay or Heston Blumenthal its UK release would doubtless have occurred much earlier. But as its rather cumbersome full title indicates this award-winning documentary is about a chef who was doubtless much better known in America than here and that is presumably why Rebecca Halpern's film made in 2021 is only reaching us now and with a release on digital downloads rather than in cinemas.
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3 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
Kevin Macdonald's career is notable for the extent to which he is a director who switches back and forth between dramas and documentaries. His work in the latter category may still be most readily associated with a film he made over twenty years ago, Touching the Void, but his subsequent varied work in that field has already included three films about singers, Marley (2012), Whitney (2018) and for television Being Mick, a 2001 piece about Jagger.
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3 weeks ago | 
filmreviewdaily.com | Mansel Stimpson
Greek classics such as Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey played no part in my education but when it comes to assessing The Return my ignorance may be an advantage. Uberto Pasolini's new film certainly draws on that work yet, since the project is one that essentially limits itself to the last section of the story and is more a reworking than a retelling, it may well be better not to approach the film with expectations based on the original.
