Gaspar Noé – The Orbital

Man’s best friend? What’s that 02? Be more dog should we? Kornél Mundruczó might beg to differ on that one if his new film, White God (‘Feher isten’), is anything to go by. In an internet-age saturated and suffocating with viral videos of nearly all things cute and cuddly under the sun squeaking and squawking, White God is quite the oxygen mask strap-on. Telecommunication marketing strategies aren’t likely to be changed though, as White God is unlikely to make it beyond the art house circuit, despite attracting critical approbation. Bearing an opening dedication to Hungary’s famed politico-auteur, Miklós Jancsó, Mundruczó’s seventh film is a political allegory with bite, a bizarre, quixotic tale of canine uprising that his countryman would have been proud to have his pawmark on. Swappin...

Stations of the Cross, dir. Dietrich Brüggemann, Germany 2014. 107 mins, cert. 15 Regular worshippers at the church of Haneke, Seidl, Schleinzer, Dumont et al will likely receive Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) as manna from heaven. Certainly this reviewer eagerly bounded up the altar steps of the ICA earlier this week. The fourth film from Dietrich Brüggemann, written with his sister and regular collaborator Anna Brüggemann, Stations won the Silver Bear for best script at the Berlinale earlier this year. Whether the film was a deserving winner I can’t tell, since I wasn’t at the festival. But without wishing to sermonise, I have full faith in the piety of their choice. Using its title mimetically, the film cleaves into fourteen minutely intertitled chapters corresponding to the eponym...

Tag: Gaspar Noé

White God Review

Stations of the Cross Review