I very nearly didn't get into Coco avant Chanel -- I arrived about 12 minutes before the screening, but apparently the evening sessions had all sold out, and there were people queuing an hour and a half before the movie started. (I had actually arrived in town earlier, but decided I needed to duck into New World to get some essentials -- mainly ( Read more... )

Trip to Asia: The Quest For Harmony was by the same guy that did the previous film about kids learning to dance. This film, about the Berlin Philharmonic going on tour in Asia, was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was that he managed to pack so many characters into the film -- there are more than twenty distinct personalities that ( Read more... )

Stacey mentioned feeling some dissonance watching Séraphine, because it shares a lead with Louise-Michel, and both characters have to live off the land because of poverty. Luckily for me, I had enough films between the two that I didn't get any more than a few weird vibes.

The movie concerned one of the artists of the modern primitives movement, a ( Read more... )

Afghan Star was very interesting -- a talent show that is basically helping reform Afghanistan by normalising music. (During the Taliban regime, all music and dancing was forbidden as un-Islamic.) In the year that they focused on, they even had three women in the top ten contestants.

However, it's not as progressive as all that -- one of the women ( Read more... )

Peta asked "In terms of enjoyment per film session, do short films beat features in your experience?"

This turned out to be a bit trickier to answer than I first thought. I mean, short films that I don't like are over more quickly, and good ones only have to sustain excellence for a short period of time, so it would seem like shorts would beat ( Read more... )

The Cove was, in some senses, a very well done film -- a rollicking adventure story of a band of plucky adventurers who use a high-tech heist to expose a corrupt government cover-up. And the footage that they capture is arresting, with the beach and cove turning red with the blood of slaughtered dolphins. And these were the rejects that didn't get ( Read more... )

My wee laptop seems to have crashed, disappearing my reviews without a trace, so let's see what I can reconstruct.

My first movie was Summer Hours, about how the eldest son and middle daughter deal with the rest of the family after their mother's death, more or less.  This was a French drama, and a little slow; but it touched on themes that were ( Read more... )

Hah! I bet some of you didn't think that I'd get around to writing up this, the last day of the festival! Well, given past experience, that's fair enough. But I've managed to claw back some free time, and I get to round out my (and your) Festival experience!

My first movie was The Order of Myths at Te Papa, about the way Mardi Gras is celebrated ( Read more... )

Thanks to what was possibly the slowest No. 2 bus in the world, I arrived at Mechanical Love only moments before it started.
This was a documentary about giving a robots a sense of presence - trying to make humanoid robots less creepy, and therapeutic animal-like companion robots for people in resting homes and the like. There were a lot of ( Read more... )

I didn't have a chance to write anything during the day, so here are some brief impressions. I likes The Station Agent, so I had hopes that The Visitor would be as good. I think it is, though there's a lot of sadness, too. A university professor who's drifting in his tenure is forced to go to New York to present at a conference; he discovers an ( Read more... )