jonathan glen Archive

Jimi: All Is By My Side DVD Review

Who doesn’t like a biopic? Well, who doesn’t like a music biopic? There may have been a few duds along the years but to look back at Walk the Line and Ray is to do so with fond remembrance, even if they are both occasionally flawed. However, even the most stunningly made music industry biopic, [...]
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Faust DVD Review

Some tales were made for the black and white era. The German folk tale of Faust has many incarnations, most notably Johann Goethe’s play, but F.W. Murnau’s film brings another dimension to the centuries old fable. Goethe’s words and expansion of the premise are undoubtedly the most significant of the appropriations but there is no [...]
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In Bloom DVD Review

In Bloom is a story told in these margins as two young girls find their voices, learning how to make themselves heard amidst a society undergoing fundamental and volatile change.
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Edinburgh International Film Festival: Round Up Two

Is the Man who is Tall Happy? (****) What must it be like to talk to “the smartest man alive”? For Michel Gondry, it seemed an overwhelming task. Trying to compute everything that linguist/economist/sociologist/political scientist Noam Chomsky has to say must be one of the most daunting tasks a man could face. Yet the French [...]
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Edinburgh International Film Festival: Stray Dogs Review

From its vivid and dystopian opening shot to its near 15 minute long closing scene of gut wrenching emotions, Ming-Liang Tsai’s Stray Dogs is a gallery of the moving image telling a story of human endurance. Tsai unveils a simple two part narrative of the life of a father (Kang-Sheng Lee) and his two children [...]
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Edinburgh International Film Festival: Round Up One

Hyena (*) We were told that Gerard Johnson’s Hyena was selected for the opening night film for EIFF 2014 because it was ‘emblematic’ of what the festival is all about. A case of a film with a bold vision, one where the style is substance and that style/substance will thrill us and uplift us. Then [...]
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