European directors have often faltered when crossing the Atlantic. Billy Wilder and Wim Wenders found things to say where Paolo Sorrentino could not. American H...
CGI loses the day in Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, a partly motion-captured, eco-minded adaptation of Roald Dahl’s adored children’s book that leans so heavily on...
It’s been two years since Ken Loach took Jimmy’s Hall -- a rather muted film by his standards, rumored at the time to be his swansong -- to the Competition here...
Italians certainly do worship their Mammas, or so goes the narrative of Marco Bellocchio’s Sweet Dreams, which opened the Cannes Director’s Fortnight sidebar to...
“You are alone you your revolution, Ms. Dickinson,” spouts a stoic headmistress in the opening sequence of A Quiet Passion, a biopic of 19th-century American po...
In 2004, it looked as if Team America: World Police had hammered the last nail in the coffin for cinema's definitive sex scene. Then, last year, in Anomalisa, C...
The pack of documentaries in this year’s Panorama selection has thrown up an interesting pair on the Berlinale’s opening weekend. Moving from filmmaking to phot...
How many great filmmakers have been lost as a result of disease and human catastrophe? That seems to be the question on the mind of documentary filmmaker Aaron ...
Ambiguity might be the most useful item in the science fiction toolbox. Blade Runner’s mysteries still rob people of sleep, and you’d need a wall chart to work ...
Irish-born, Berlin-based, Rory O'Connor has been covering the European film festival circuit since 2012. A regular contributor to The Film Stage, his work has also appeared in Frieze, The Playlist, and CineVue.
