Reviews

A lyrical and intimate film that both celebrates and mourns an increasingly disappearing way of life.

Who benefits in the art world? And at what cost? A film that asks plenty of questions and astutely comes up with some viable answers.

Interlaced with no frills interviews we see in 100 UP the daily lives of seven centenarians with quite extraordinary life stories.

Álvarez’s observational black-and-white film intimately documents the intense sessions of a reading group who meet in a Buenos Aires café.

Gorbachev. Heaven shows a vulnerable, yet proud and quietly cunning old man, stuck in time, with nothing to lose.

The dream to make a sleepy French village a Mecca for auteur documentary makes for an intriguing and ultimately enthralling story.

An impressively structured film rich in terms of beautifully composed images which brings an understated anger about what has befallen its central character.

Heart-breaking, severe, revolutionary. Using simple but effective composition, Zhao Dayong’s story of one man’s resistance against property developers, screening in Opus Bonum competition, creates a raw atmosphere which never shies away from the harsh realities that many societies have to experience within China today.

One of the international films selected for DocLisboa Signals (the first of six sessions before the end of March 2021) is Gregory Monro’s Kubrick by Kubrick, in which the director himself finally talks about his oeuvre. BDE reviewed the film earlier this year.

Twice in a lifetime. 36 years on from the release of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s iconic Talking Heads’ concert movie, comes David Byrne’s American Utopia in which Spike Lee documents Byrne’s wildly popular 2019/20 Broadway show, performed with a troupe of 11 international musicians.