'Nasir': Film Review | Rotterdam 2020

A driftily disjointed evocation of urban ennui, Zheng Lu Xinyuan's feature debutThe Cloud in Her Room(Ta fang jian li de yun) combines narrative and experimental techniques to conjure the inner life of its 22-year-old protagonist Muzi (Jin Jing).

One of the prestigious nights for Hollywood, the Oscar Awards 2020 was held on February 10 at Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and the who’s who of the world of cinema were a part of it. As a part of tradition, the Oscar award for the Original Song was to be presented this year too. However, before that the Original Song Montage was presented in which Indian composer AR Rahman’s 2009 hit track, ‘Jai Ho’ from Slumdog Millionaire found its mention. 

The Oscars 2020 made a whole lot of noise in India on Monday morning as the best in the entertainment business were awarded. From Hollywood's A-listers to filmmakers and talent from all over, the Oscars this year did not disappoint despite majorly snubbing women directors.

The understated, deeply humane approach director Arun Karthick takes in addressing the heinous anti-Muslim rhetoric infecting Indian politics today proves far more powerful than any larger-scale drama one can imagine. “Nasir” is a superb example of what can be done on a tiny budget when the vision is strong, the script is low-key, and the performers privilege rapport and naturalism over dramatic flourishes.

Lanarkshire badminton ace Kirsty Gilmour is confident that she’s on track to qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

An immersive political documentary that might be useful as a glass half-full/half-empty personality test, Ramona S.

Lyrical and provocative,Acasă, My Homebrings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life.

The way religious law penetrates every aspect of Iranian life, from a murder case to how a TV show is run, is probably the most striking aspect of Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness. The perverse logic of temporary marriage, inheritance laws favoring boys and homicide laws stacked against wives, not to mention the practice of paying one’s way out of a hanging with “bloody money” to the victim’s relatives, become casual plot elements in this well-shot, cleverly scripted melodrama.

By Tom Grater

It's the little indignities that get you. Not that the inciting incident in writer-director Visar Morina's very fine Exil is in any way trivial.

Netflix seriously raised the bar on the true-crime police procedural with Unbelievable, its shattering, forensically detailed miniseries about the hunt for a serial rapist. That standard of excellence does no favors to this poorly scripted feature from the streaming platform, based on the unsolved Long Island Serial Killer case in which more than a dozen sex workers were murdered over a period of almost 20 years.

Playing a security worker (like a TSA agent) at London's Stansted airport whose simmering mental unease finally comes to a rolling boil one day, Ben Whishaw contributes a scalding performance in Surge.This feature debut for director Aneil Karia, who has directed episodes of edgier TV shows such as Top Boy and Pure in the U.K., grew out of an earlier collaboration between Karia, Whishaw and movement coach Laura Williamson Biggson, the short filmBeat.

Everyone has a favorite book that we long to see adapted into a film so more people will know about the book and read it too. At the same time, we also dread the filmmakers will ruin it by misrepresenting or diluting the essence of what makes that book so special.For many people living with autism, their most beloved tome on the subject is The Reason I Jump.

It's easy to see why documentary and TV director Andrew Cohn's first narrative feature, The Last Shift, was at one time considered as a project for Alexander Payne, who remains on board as executive producer. Empathy for aging men navigating complicated crossroads in their unfulfilled lives has often shaped Payne's films and very much applies to the terminal under-achiever played here with characteristic dimension and heart by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda is an idiosyncratic storyteller with an affinity for brainy radicals and the work of forward-thinking scientific minds, most recently in Experimenter and Marjorie Prime.

In her feature-length debut Farewell Amor, Ekwa Msangi explores the meaning of home for an Angolan immigrant family newly reunited in New York City after almost two decades apart.According to the United Nations, the United States currently hosts 51 million international migrants (about 19 percent of the world’s population), the largest number of any country in the world.

There are astonishing sequences of sensory splendor in Alejandro Telemaco Tarraf's Piedra sola, ones that recall and even sometimes rival the work of such obvious forebears as Carlos Reygadas, Terrence Malick and Lisandro Alonso.

There's more than a hint of early eighties Tom Cruise about Argentinian newcomer Juan Pablo Cestaro who stars in Marco Berger'sYoung Hunter(El cazador), the premise of whichcoyly echoes that of Risky Business.This time, however, the horny teen who gets into carnally-related deep water after being left alone by vacationing parents happens to be gay.

Intentionally provocative, artistically uncompromising and self-consciously polemical, La Leyenda Negra attempts to inform by incitement, challenging audiences to concede to an unvarnished view of migrant life in working-class Los Angeles. Writer-director Patricia Vidal Delgado’s black-and-white, micro-budget feature is an unabashed advocacy film, dedicated to immigrants living in the U.S.

LOS ANGELES – Many stars arrived at the 2020 Grammy Awards on Sunday in Los Angeles with heavy hearts as they reeled in the tragic news surrounding the death of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others after the helicopter they were traveling in crashed in Calabasas, Calif.