Directors of the Year
Here is a question that the CV of Jacques Audiard begs - one he may spend his entire career trying to answer: if you are the child of privilege, the son of a successful screenwriter who grew up outside Paris with le tout French film industry wandering through your lovely home, why do you end up obsessed with gangsters? There is a threefold...
Action directors, it seems, are allowed to screw up now and again. Ridley and Tony Scott, Roland Emmerich, even the revered Clint Eastwood have all perpetrated the occasional box-office disaster, apparently without doing irrevocable major damage to their careers. It’s only if - as so rarely happens - the action director in question is female...
Park Chan-wook by Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc
One of the key figures in South Korean cinema, writer and director Park Chan-wook has created a body of work that is uncompromising in its depiction of violence, yet engrossing in its art-house sensibilities and tight scripting. Although commentators have often focused on the transgressive and visceral nature of his films, this belies the wider...
Born in 1948 in Paris but raised in French colonial Africa where her Father worked as a Regional Administrator, Claire Denis’ childhood was, by her own account, an itinerant one that may have later helped inform the remarkable sense of spatial and temporal displacement so prevalent in her work. Her father instilled in her an appreciation for...
A characteristically uncompromising film, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, depicts a planet in the throes of a seemingly irreversible demise. An unforgiving world, familiar from those previously evoked in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, To Have and To Hold and The Proposition, the savage...
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