WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA PART 1 ★★★★★
Directed by Mark Cousins. Featuring Tilda Swinton. FI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, 179 min
The first part of Cousins's epic study of female directors is as lucid and gripping as we have come to expect from this film boffin. He has, perhaps wisely, not attempted a feminist history of the medium. We hear few musings on what distinguishes the female voice in cinema. What we have, rather, is a massive lecture on cinematic technique that just happens to take films by women as its examples. Swinton intones the Belfast man's text beautifully. DC
TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE ★★★★☆
Directed by Ena Sendijarevic. Starring Sara Luna Zoric, Lazar Dragojevic, Ernad Prnjavorac. Mubi, 91 min
Alma (a delightfully deadpan Zoric) is a young woman of Bosnian heritage who has been raised in the Netherlands by her mother. She decides to visit her father, who returned to his native country out of homesickness years earlier, after learning he has been hospitalised. Many droll Jarmuschian misadventures ensue. Sendijarevic's spirited sexual awakening dramedy, trills with feminine desires and wiles. A relief from the current cookie-cutter genre flicks and gender swapped indies. TB
TRUE FICTION ★★★☆☆
Directed by Braden Croft. Starring Sara Garcia, John Cassini, Julian Black Antelope, Julian Richings. Google Play, YouTube, 94 min
Impressive Canadian horror concerning a young woman (Garcia) who goes to work for a fading horror writer (Cassini) and becomes caught up in sinister experiments. Budget restraints are evident. The script sometimes strains to make sense. But director Croft makes an efficient chamber piece of the final act. Garcia has just the right purse-mouthed energy for a wised-up Final Girl of the current century. Cassini has more fun still with a pompous variation on certain caricatures of the horror novelist. DC
THE COUNTY ★★★☆☆
Directed by Grímur Hákonarson. Starring Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson. Curzon Home, 92 min
After her husband's suicide, farmer Inga (Egilsdóttir) discovers that he had been secretly working for the local co-operative as an informant against those farmers who broke rank to sneak off to purchase goods elsewhere. For all the grit and purpose in Egilsdóttir's central performance, the latent objectivism of the project recalls the red scare New Deal bashing of The Fountainhead (1949). Still, Icelandic cinema is seldom short of fire and ice, and cinematographer Mart Taniel's vistas are breathtaking. TB
