Festival Review: Nobody Wants The Night / Nadie Quiere La Noche Aie (2015)
★★★☆☆
Shifting the story from polar explorer Peary to his wife, Isabel Coixet’sNobody Wants The Night offers a distinctly female slant on colonisation.
Europe
La Maison De La Radio (2013)
★★★★☆
Did video kill the radio? Nicolas Philibert uncovers the mystery of the medium in his warmly human documentary La Maison de la Radio.
Testament Of Youth (2014)
★★★★☆
A beautiful adaptation of Vera Brittain’s bestselling memoir, James Kent’s Testament Of Youth is a bitter tale of love in wartime for the 21st century.
The Last Of The Unjust / Le Dernier Des Injustes (2013)
★★★★☆
If this is a man. Claude Lanzmann’s The Last Of The Unjust recuts unused Shoah interviews to reveal the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein – Europe’s last Jewish Elder.
The Theory Of Everything (2014)
★★★★☆
Dramatisation of Stephen Hawking’s life from gifted university student and romance with the woman who became his wife, to international acclaim as a physicist and the break-up of his marriage.
The Woman in Black: The Angel of Death (2015)
★★★☆☆
Horror story which begins as schoolchildren and their teachers are evacuated from London to a deserted house in the remote countryside in World War II.
Kon-Tiki (2012)
★★★☆☆
Friends since childhood, Kon-Tiki directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg sail through their Norse saga of adventure, friendship and trust with a handsome parable on film-making.
The Circle / Der Kreis (2014)
★★★★☆
Going back to the future through interviews with Switzerland’s first gay married couple, Stefan Haupt’s half-documentary The Circle reveals a postwar openness ahead of its time.
Electricity (2014)
★★★☆☆
Occasionally hampered by one-dimensional characters, Agyness Deyn is the scintillating spark of a film that convincingly encapsulates the defiance of life with epilepsy.
The Great Museum / Das große Museum (2014)
★★★★☆
A fascinating glimpse of the goings-on at one of the grandes dames of Europe’s museum scene, The Great Museum offers a compelling portrait of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Eastern Boys (2013)
★★★★☆
A strangely romantic tale of east meets west, Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys brings European immigration from the political into the personal scale.
School of Babel/La Cour de Babel (2014)
★★★★☆
French director Julie Bertuccelli’s classroom documentary School of Babel examines twenty-four foreign teenagers’ struggles as they adapt to a new life, culture and language in France.
Black Sea (2014)
★★★☆☆
In Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea, a motley crew of British and Russian submariners try to recover a fortune in gold from a sunk World War II German submarine.
Hello Carter (2013)
★★★☆☆
Down-on-his-luck Carter has recently become homeless, single and unemployed. Desperate to win back his ex-girlfriend, he goes off on an adventure throughout London to find her, picking up some odd helpers along the way.