Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking), A War — one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film — examines the divide between the military and domestic spheres in the life of Claus Pedersen (Lindholm regular Pilou Asbaek). He is unit leader of a small Danish NATO contingent in Afghanistan; his wife, Maria (Tuva Novotny), tries her best to hold down the home front, a battleground of another sort in which their three young children are non-lethal combatants. The separation of these domains becomes more and more clouded; the occasional satellite phone call is about all that […]

TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]

In its first half, the Competition of the 72nd Venice Film Festival has been a let-down, failing to present a single truly great title. The Orizzonti and Out of Competition selections have generally proved a safer bet, and of course the excellent Venice Classics program, which so far included screenings of restored masterpieces by the likes of Fellini, Melville and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has been a reliable and most welcome morale boost whenever necessary. Following Birdman and Gravity in the last two years, the festival extended its string of star-studded, big-spectacle openers with Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, a fictionalization of an infamous 1996 commercial […]