This post brings together all of my AV Festival coverage for Front Row Reviews so far. A second part will follow in a fortnight or so. [April 7: second part here.]
The Art of Time (2009)Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh’s 2009 documentary examines how leading contemporary artists are responding to and utilising ever-changing perceptions of time in their work.
Read more
Aurora (2010)
This long film about killing is Romanian writer-director Cristi Puiu’s second entry in a planned series of six, dealing with stories set in Bucharest.
Read more
Colossal Youth (2006)
Shot on DV using only natural light assisted by reflective surfaces, this unique, deeply moving film aesthetically and narratively embodies the marginality of its on-screen ensemble.
Read more
Double Tide (2009)
Sharon Lockhart’s film presents two long takes of Jen Casad digging for clams twice a day in the mudflats of coastal Maine.
Read more
Five (2003)
Kiarostami's retreat into self-prescribed aesthetic regression, disingenuously subtitled "Five Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu".
Read more
The Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) (2006)
Albert Serra's DV-shot, sparsely-plotted, Catalan-language adaptation of Spanish hero Don Quixote aspires to the elemental.
Read more
Hors Satan (2011)
French writer-director Bruno Dumont's typically restrained and ambiguous drama, filmed on France's Opal Coast.
Read more
Nightfall (2011)
James Benning's strangely beguiling 97-minute take of night falling upon a Sierra Nevada Mountains idyll, 8,000ft high.
Read more
Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's best film yet is an ambitious and challenging work, achieving a balance between its talky police procedural plot and a melancholic human drama.
Read more
Russian Ark (2002)
Aleksandr Sokurov's formally impressive tour of St. Petersburg's Winter Palace investigating Russia's history. Curiosity gives way to irritation.
Read more
Stalker (1979)
Tarkovsky's classic antecedent to "slow cinema" sustains a beauty even if its ambiguities betray its director's apparent intellectual confusions.
Read more
The Turin Horse (2011)
Its director's final film (read Srini's review here): a troubling swansong for the inimitable powerhouse auteur Béla Tarr.
Read more
