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Vilnius Film Festival · 2022

Vilnius Film Festival 2022

Masters

Programme

15 films · 10 reviews

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Annette

Review preview for Annette

I could not have wished for a more perfect first film to wean me back into the in-cinema press screening world I left behind in March 2020.

Anne-Katrin Titze · 5 out of 5
A stand-up comedian and his opera singer wife have a daughter with a surprising gift.

(Country: France, Mexico, US, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Germany; Year: 2021; Director: Leos Carax; Writer: Ron Mael, Russell Mael; Stars: Marion Cotillard, Adam Driver, Simon Helberg, Ron Mael, Russel Mael, Devyn McDowell)

Full review See: Interview with Marion Cotillard about Annette

The Balcony Movie (Film Balkonowy)

Review preview for The Balcony Movie

Like the people in front of his balcony, the meaning of the film meets Lozinski in each subsequent interaction.

Mateusz Tarwacki · 4 out of 5
Documentary composed from the conversations that the director holds with people passing by in the street under his Warsaw apartment.

(Country: Poland; Year: 2021; Director: Pawel Lozinski; Writer: Pawel Lozinski)

Full review

Benediction

Review preview for Benediction

Running alongside the film's more elegiac sweep is a cut-glass wit.

Amber Wilkinson · 4.5 out of 5
Siegfried Sassoon biopic.

(Country: UK, US; Year: 2021; Director: Terence Davies; Writer: Terence Davies; Stars: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Jeremy Irvine, Matthew Tennyson, Ben Daniels, Kate Phillips, Geraldine James, Gemma Jones, Anton Lesser, Lia Williams, Simon Russell Beale, Kellie Shirley, Suzanne Bertish, Harry Lawtey, Tom Blyth)

Full review

The Circus

Review preview for The Circus

It'll make you fall in love with Chaplin, and with cinema, all over again.

James Benefield · 4 out of 5
The Little Tramp takes a job as a clown and falls for the ringmaster's daughter.

(Country: US; Year: 1928; Director: Charles Chaplin; Writer: Charles Chaplin; Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia)

Full review

Evolution

The story of three generations of a family, asking if we repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us.

(Country: Hungary; Year: 2021; Director: Kornél Mundruczo; Writer: Kornél Mundruczo, based on his own play.)

France (On A Half Clear Morning)

Review preview for France

France is a supremely sad film, maybe the saddest Dumont has made in its interplay of the true and the fake.

Anne-Katrin Titze · 5 out of 5
A TV journalist's career, home life, and psychological stability are shaken after a driving accident.

(Country: France, Italy, Germany, Belgium; Year: 2021; Director: Bruno Dumont; Writer: Bruno Dumont; Stars: Léa Seydoux, Blanche Gardin, Benjamin Biolay, Emanuele Arioli, Juliane Köhler, Gaëtan Amiel, Jewad Zemmar, Marc Bettinelli)

Full review

A Hero (Ghahreman)

Review preview for A Hero

Beautifully photographed as always, with a colour palette whose soft, shifting hues reflect its moral and narrative ambiguity, A Hero is one of Farhadi’s finest works.

Jennie Kermode · 4 out of 5
When an ex-con's decides to try and rehabilitate himself by returning a lost bag of coins and exploiting the media attention, nothing goes to plan.

(Country: Iran; Year: 2021; Director: Asghar Farhadi; Writer: Asghar Farhadi; Stars: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Sarina Farhadi)

Full review

I Want to Talk About Duras

Review preview for I Want to Talk About Duras

Swann Arlaud as Yann Andréa and Emmanuelle Devos as Michèle Manceaux give tremendous performances that circle around discoveries of deep personal truths.

Anne-Katrin Titze · 4 out of 5
Portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa.

(Country: France; Year: 2021; Director: Claire Simon; Writer: Claire Simon, based on the book by Yann Andréa; Stars: Emmanuelle Devos, Swann Arlaud)

Full review

Mariner Of The Mountains

In January 2019, Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz boards a boat in Marseille in order to make his first ever visit to his father’s homeland, Algeria.

(Country: Brazil, France, Germany, Algeria; Year: 2021; Director: Karim Aïnouz; Writer: Karim Aïnouz, Murilo Hauser)

Memoria

Review preview for Memoria

For all the talk of hermetical storytelling, this might be his least hermetic and most approachable movie to date.

Nikola Jovic · 4 out of 5
A woman from Scotland, while traveling in Colombia, begins to notice strange sounds. Soon she begins to think about their appearance.

(Country: Colombia, Mexico, France, UK, Thailand, Germany, China, Switzerland; Year: 2021; Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Stars: Tilda Swinton, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Jeanne Balibar, Juan Pablo Urrego, Daniel Toro)

Full review

Mutzenbacher

With an ad in a newspaper, Ruth Beckermann announces a casting call for a film based on a well-known pornographic text. The film, Mutzenbacher, sees a hundred men confronted with excerpts from the novel, Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, in an age when sex is more ubiquitous than ever, and yet at same time is met with a highly charged moral environment.

(Country: Austria; Year: 2022; Director: Ruth Beckermann; Writer: Ruth Beckermann, Claus Philipp)

The Restless (Les Intranquilles, De Peur qu'Il Ne Sauve)

Review preview for The Restless

Lafosse makes excellent choices with his editor Marie-Hélène Dozo (long-time collaborator of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) in what is shown on screen and what is left out for us to fill in.

Anne-Katrin Titze · 4.5 out of 5
A family struggles with the father's bipolar disorder.

(Country: Belgium, France, Luxembourg; Year: 2021; Director: Joachim Lafosse; Writer: Lou Du Pontavice, Juliette Goudot, Pablo Guarise, Joachim Lafosse, Chloé Leonil, Anne-Lise Morin, François Pirot; Stars: Damien Bonnard, Leïla Bekhti, Gabriel Merz Chammah Patrick Descamps, Alexandre Gavras)

Full review

Sundown

Alice and Neil Bennett are the core of a wealthy British family on vacation in Acapulco with younger members Colin and Alexa until a distant emergency cuts their trip short. When one relative disrupts the family’s tight-knit order, surprising tensions rise to the fore.

(Country: France, Mexico; Year: 2021; Director: Michel Franco; Writer: Michel Franco; Stars: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Samuel Bottomley, Henry Goodman, Iazua Larios, Mónica Del Carmen, James Tarpey, Albertine Kotting McMillan)

The Wedding Day (Wesele)

The past and present blurs at an eventful wedding.

(Country: Poland, Latvia; Year: 2021; Director: Wojciech Smarzowski; Writer: Wojciech Smarzowski; Stars: Robert Wieckiewicz, Michalina Labacz, Agata Kulesza, Ryszard Ronczewski, Mateusz Wieclawek, Agata Turkot, Tomasz Schuchardt, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Andrzej Chyra, Michal Gadomski, Przemyslaw Przestrzelski, Krzysztof Kowalewski, Anna Szymanczyk, Michael S. Ruscheinsky, Katarzyna Cynke)