Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore arrives with considerable hype from Quebec, where it garnered thirteen nominations in the 2012 Genie Awards. In many ways, the praise is understandable. Masterfully shot, edited, sound-mixed and scored, and featuring several fantastic performances, the movie is, in its best moments, phenomenal. Intermingling two tales of love and loss separated by thousands of kilometres and decades in time, individual scenes unfold with such devastating beauty [...]

Once is a coincidence, twice is an anomaly. Seventeen times is definitely a trend. A troubling tale of teenage naivety, 17 Girls [17 filles] takes its premise from a real life occurrence in a Massachusetts high-school in 2008, where seventeen students conspired amongst themselves to become pregnant. In this fictional French retelling, the trouble begins with queen-bee Camille (Louise Grinberg) reveals that she is up the duff. Seeking the support [...]

On the night of November 9, 1989, the ground-breaking gay film Coming Out was set to premiere to an East German repressed, homosexual audience, but fatefully, another ground-breaking event occurred that night: the Berlin Wall came down. As co-director Ringo Rösener narrates in his and Markus Stein’s Panorama documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der Ddr (Among Men — Gay In East Germany), the gay GDR community was robbed that [...]

The Mike Leigh method of filmmaking is a bit like the bible: collaboratively constructed, religiously studied and often woefully, disastrously misconstrued. Thankfully, however, Leigh still walks among us, and at this year‘s Berlinale Talent Campus, the British director imparted his candid wisdom to a packed audience of filmmaking apostles eager to learn about his distinctive approach to creating cinematic worlds.

“The distinction between writing and directing doesn’t exist,” began Leigh in [...]

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that from January 25^th until February 5^th, I had the great pleasure of attending the 41^st annual International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Over the twelve days of the festival, amidst the frequently sub-zero temperatures of a European winter, I watched twenty-three feature films from five continents, hobnobbed with members of the international press, and attended the prestigious Tiger Awards ceremony, designed to [...]

A charming comedy set in the cutthroat world of Norway’s least popular sport, Ole Endresen’s Curling King was a colossal audience hit at this year’s International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Co-writer Atle Antonsen (a popular Norwegian comedian) also stars as Truls Paulsen, a once champion curler whose manic obsession with the sport eventually saw him institutionalised with obsessive compulsive disorder. Released after a decade – heavily medicated – into the [...]