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 [...]

Outspoken Danish director Lars von Trier could do with the editing finesse of Molly Marlene Stensgaard during his run-ins with the press, not just his films. The gracious and soft-spoken Stensgaard has edited Trier’s most highly regarded works, including Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Melancholia. After appearing on a panel at this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus discussing the collaborative process between editors, directors and screenwriters, Stensgaard took time aside [...]

In a Filipino slum, a desperate mother fights back tears as she chaperones her daughter to the doorstep of an elderly Caucasian man, ready to make a transaction that she’ll forever regret. This sequence, preceded by a child publicly defecating in the street, is the very definition of poverty porn, almost to the point where you expect to see UNICEF listed in the production credits.

Redeemably, however, the above sequence invites [...]

Pink Floyd called it: there’s something on the dark side of the moon, and it’s not Michael Bay’s Transformers. No, we’re talking Moon Nazis; Astral Aryans who have spent the last few decades developing a final solution they hope to be, well, much more final than their last one.

That’s the zany conceit fuelling Timo Vuorensola’s sci-fi sendup Iron Sky; a Finnish, German and Australian co-production that strips Star Wars of [...]

From the opening scene, in which lead character Swanson (Tim Heidecker) describes in detail the effects of an anal prolapse before insulting the sexuality of the male nurse whose job it is to take care of his barely breathing invalid father, Rick Alverson’s new film does everything it can to be as aggressively alienating as humanly possible. An ugly tale of a fat, over-privileged, middle-aged New York hipster stuck in [...]

If I eschew traditional film reviewing conventions here, it’s because the work I’m reviewing isn’t really a film at all. One of the features of the “Signals: For Real” section at this year’s International Film Festival of Rotterdam – a programme designed to challenge and subvert the ways viewers think about cinema – Soundtrackcity Rotterdam is in a lot of ways more like an audiobook than a movie – although [...]