Watch any film at the San Sebastian Film Festival and you can feel like you're taking your life in your hands – two hours of it, anyway. The event, which prides itself on being a champion of the avant-garde, is a notorious game of chance when it comes to buying tickets. So it is a bit surprising when you see a film that delivers exactly what it promises. The Impossible (‘Lo imposible’), a US-Spanish production directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) is the story of one family's struggle for survival following the devastating tsunami that hit their hotel resort in Thailand on Boxing Day 2004. It is based on the true-life story of Spaniards Quique Álvarez and María Belón … [Read more...] about San Sebastián Film Festival: disaster and art
cinema
Red Lights: The sceptics are heroes in paranormal movie thriller
In the opening minutes of Red Lights, the new paranormal thriller by Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés, Dr Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) arrive at a house on a hill to investigate a reported ghost. Big, old and surrounded by skeletal trees - the place certainly looks haunted. But the thing is, it isn’t. The suspected poltergeist is just an unhappy little girl, slamming her wardrobe door to scare the bejesus out of mum and dad. Case closed. By day, Matheson and Buckley teach paranormal scepticism to psychology students and by night and on the weekends, they’re a hoax-fighting duo, exposing alleged hauntings and fraudulent psychics. But they meet their … [Read more...] about Red Lights: The sceptics are heroes in paranormal movie thriller
A cinema industry locked in confusion
Two new films have just won the top prizes in their respective countries: Celda 211 (or Cell 211), by Spanish director Daniel Monzón; and A Prophet, directed by France’s Jacques Audiard. Both are prison dramas. Both are currently on release in Spain. Both are box office smashes. And that’s pretty much where the similarities end. A Prophet is a confidently directed, superbly acted, universal story of a young man’s rite of passage into hell; at the same time it’s an indictment of France’s brutal prison system, where a disproportionate number of Arabs are locked away, often for relatively minor crimes. Celda 211, on the other hand, is a lacklustre yarn based on a formulaic script, … [Read more...] about A cinema industry locked in confusion
Never a prophet in his own land?
First, the Goyas. He was in the running for best original screenplay, but didn’t make it. More importantly for many, Pedro Almodóvar returned on February 14 to Spain’s top movie awards ceremony after a five-year absence to hand Daniel Monzón the best film prize for Celda 211. His presence was highly symbolic, given that Broken Embraces had been overlooked for Spain’s top film prize, as had he for best director. The film was nominated in five categories, among them best screenplay; in the end it won best soundtrack. This year, the story is that the director and the Academy have made their peace, even if Almodóvar rejected a very public plea from the organization’s president, Alex de la … [Read more...] about Never a prophet in his own land?