Carl Nilsson-Polias

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
100 Days, 100 Nights
Roll me up in some gold lamé, serve me up some sweet home cooking and call me your big daddy, because Sharon Jones has filled my glass with funk anticipation. From the first brassy intro to the last full-band fade-out, the album 100 Days, 100 Nights has the […]

This film is a devastatingly good example of storytelling that is both potent drama and documentary. The documentary-as-film paradigm has gained momentum as audiences realise that the social milieu of the cinema is more conducive to collective outrage or edification than the isolating domain of television. Nevertheless, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s film is strong […]

Monster movies are generally a critically maligned genre. But that’s because monster movies generally have all the cinematic quality of a two-week-old lamb kebab. On the other hand, Korean cinema is the hottest thing around the festival circuit. So, what do you get when you synergise it up with a Korean monster flick? You get […]

In a wasteland of monochromatic post-industrial dullness we see fleeting moments of quiet desperation, quixotic humour and heaving torpor. It’s kind of like Samuel Beckett went to Ikea and came back with everything and a kitchen sink. The characters are beautifully realised archetypes and their stories, unravelled across intersecting vignettes, present modern maladies and […]

Theo van Gogh’s legacy as a filmmaker is darkly tied to the tragic end of his life but as Interview illustrates, his sense of humour is equally worthy of our attention. The film has the deceptively simple structure of a two-hander conversation that, in its rich text and complex psychological games, unearths a complex thematic […]

A disclaimer: from all appearances, Werner Herzog lives a highly creative, highly prolific, highly nomadic existence of which I am insanely envious. I feel a pang of excitement whenever there’s an opportunity to see a new Herzog film as much because I want to vicariously inhabit his world as I want to see the movie. […]

Alexander Sokurov is known for making films that walk the knife-edge of indulgent minimalism. To some, his films are devoid of plots, deliberately obscure and fundamentally boring. Then there are some of us who think his films are pretty damn good. Then there are the ardent Sokurists who bow down before his Slavic certainty like […]

“Auschwitz” and “tongue-in-cheek comedy” aren’t often phrases that share the same sentence, but this documentary from Italy covers both. Primo Levi the chemist, novelist and Holocaust survivor immortalised his recollections of his internment in If This Is A Man. He followed this up with The Truce, which journalled the ten months it took him and […]

History is written by the victors, they say. History is also written by the colonisers. Despite the justifiability of Western Europe’s indignation at the neo-con imperialism of Bush, Cheney et alia, there is something undeniably hypocritical in their stand when considered from the perspective of their own colonial pasts. Take two of the producing countries […]

Julie Christie returns to the big screen and, her beauty as crystalline and mesmerising as ever, she remains a luminous presence. We are introduced to an apparently blissful retired family life. The lighting is warm, the location bucolic, the cross-country skis are new, the hair silver but lush, the couture that catalogue-perfect ensemble of earth-coloured, […]