JBdV

JBdV

Favorite films

  • Brazil
  • Close-Up
  • A Brighter Summer Day
  • Chinatown

Recent activity

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  • Guelwaar

    ★★★★½

  • Faat Kiné

  • The Beast Must Die

  • If I Should Die Before I Wake

Recent reviews

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  • When I Saw You

    When I Saw You

    @ BFI Southbank/Reclaim the Frame with Annemarie Jacir Q&A.

  • Out of the Blue

    Out of the Blue

    ★★

    This kind of film has been done better many times (cf. Les bons debarras, also 1980).

Popular reviews

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  • The Land

    The Land

    Egypt and Egyptians have a sacred relation to water, especially that of the Nile, and to earth, provider of the crops that has sustained this land for thousands of years. With his 1969 film The Land, Youssef Chahine, patron saint of Egyptian cinema, makes a stirring film about that sacred bond and the dangers that threaten it, perhaps having already abolished it.

    It is set in the Egypt of the 1930s. A village of farmers and peasants on the Nile…

  • Landscape

    Landscape

    "Even more impressive was Loznitsa’s next film, Landscape. His first film in colour, it extended his formalist concerns through a series of virtuosic left-to-right pans around rural Russians, waiting at a village bus-stop. The uninterrupted circular motion introduces the precisely choreographed camera movement which would become a trademark, but the most important novelty compared to previous work was that the people on-screen were now given a voice. A soundtrack of multiple conversations, chattering about variously grim topics from alcoholism to…