The Maid / La Nana (2009)
★★★★☆
Replacing a passive-agressive, quarrelsome maid isn’t easy, as Sebastián Silva’s comic gem La Nana shows. It’s class conflict gone the family way.
Country
Hideaway / Le Refuge (2009)
★★★☆☆
With a heroin junkie and her dead lover’s gay brother hiding away together, François Ozon’s Le Refuge is a subdued meditation on parenthood and loss. It’s baby boom and bust.
Contracorriente / Undertow (2009)
★★★★☆
With man-on-man love in a small Peruvian fishing village, Javier Fuentes-León’s Contracorriente has Latin American machismo swimming against a high tide.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009)
★★★☆☆
As a passionate affair between two 20th century icons, Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a perfumed symphony of style. But where are the heart notes?
Frontier Blues (2009)
★★★☆☆
Set in a border backwater in Northern Iran, Babak Jalali’s Frontier Blues follows four men rapidly losing the plot in a land without women.
Gainsbourg (Vie Héroïque) (2010)
★★★★☆
From chanson to reggae, Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg is a soul-staking odyssey through Serge’s life and conquests, through Docteur Jekyll Et Monsieur Hyde.
Film Review: Bluebeard / Barbe Bleue (2009)
★★★☆☆
A faithful adaptation of Perrault’s fairytale, Bluebeard nevertheless conceals a bevy of Catherine Breillat’s favourite themes. But where’s the eroticism?
South Of The Border (2009)
★★★☆☆
Über-director Oliver Stone’s latest documentary film South of the Border offers a provocative glance at the US media’s take on Latin American politics.
Ivul (2009)
★★★☆☆
Biting into the forbidden apple of incest, Andrew Kötting’s Ivul charts the fall of civilisation in a Russian émigré family. Or is he barking up the wrong tree?
Wild Grass / Les Herbes Folles (2009)
★★★★☆
Alain Resnais, the great grand-monsieur of French cinema is de retour with Wild Grass a complex, lilting tale of the power of chance.
Villa Amalia (2009)
★★★☆☆
Cheerfully nihilistic, Benoît Jacquot’s Villa Amalia stars Isabelle Huppert as a pianist reinventing her life from scratch on the coast of Naples. O sole mio.
Women Without Men (2009)
★★★☆☆
Iranian visual artist, Shirin Neshat’s directorial debut focuses on the lives of four women set against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1950s Iran.
The Killer Inside Me (2010)
★★★★☆
Violent and misogynistic, Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me adapts Jim Thompson’s noir novel to expose ’50s America’s darker side. It’s pulp friction.
The Girl On The Train / La Fille du RER (2009)
★★★☆☆
André Techiné’s The Girl On The Train is not so much an exploration of modern antisemitism as a cumulation of our collective fears. Just mind the moral gap.