5 min movie guide

  • Kedi

    Kedi

    Turkish filmmaker Ceyda Torun and her cinematographer Charlie Wuppermann must have the patience of saints  to make this enchanting new documentary of theirs, as they stalked and trailed what seemed like thousands of cats that roam the streets of Istanbul for the best part of two months.  What had originally enticed Torun, a native of…

  • Starless Dreams

    Starless Dreams

    Mehrdad Oskouei’s unflinching and extremely personal documentary shot in a  rehabilitation center for female juvenile delinquents in Tehran for 20 days leading up to New Year, will unquestionably be one of the saddest stories to hit our screens this year.  It took the filmmaker seven years to persuade the Iranian authorities to allow him to film an imprisoned…

  • Silence

    Silence

    It took Martin Scorsese several decades to bring Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 celebrated epic novel Silence about religious persecution in 17th Century Japan to the screen, and this obvious project of passion is one of the filmmaker’s most visually stunning movies to date.  Endō, a Japanese Roman Catholic, based his story on an historical figure Cristóvão Ferreira a Portuguese…

  • Jackie

    Jackie

    Given that the rather impressive resume of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is made up of generally aggressive dramas interspersed with violence about his own country, then it is quite extraordinary that he chose such a high profile quintessential American subject such as ‘Jackie’ as his first English speaking movie.  Larraín is on quite a high…