ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Reviews 

FUGUE – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , ,

The film begins as a dishevelled Alicja wanders dazed along train tracks, approaching a busy station where she promptly hitches up her skirt, squats, and pisses on the train platform for all to see. Two years later we find she has been institutionalised, suffering from the dissociative “fugue” of the film’s title, where a protective doctor decides to put her on television to see if they can discover her identity. It works, and overnight Alicja discovers that she is a woman called Kinga with a husband, young child and extended family. Returning to her original home as she waits for an identity card, Alicja’s past slowly returns to her as she discovers what led to her curious predicament.

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Reviews 

TRAMPS! – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , , , , , ,

Drenched as it is in outré fashion and camp excess, while the early ‘80s trappings of New Romantic may seemingly encourage us to dismiss it as a shiny yet broadly shallow subcultural blip somewhere between punk and new wave, the intersection of the personal and the political lies at the heart of Kevin Hegge’s documentary Tramps!. Illustrating how a range of disparate threads came together from punk to glam rock to Thatcherism, Hegge combines compelling and often very intimate new interviews with jaw-dropping archival footage of key figures such as Siouxsie Sioux, Boy George, Leigh Bowery and Derek Jarman.

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Festivals Reviews 

PERPETRATOR (Berlinale2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , , ,

House-breaking kleptomaniac Jonquil Baptise is known as Jonny to her friends – or, at least, she would be if she had any. With her relationship with her struggling, disconnected father in tatters, Jonny is sent to live with the long-estranged – and strange – Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverston), who seems to know much more about the teenage girl than the latter is wholly comfortable with. Sent to a strict private school, Jonny learns quickly about a spate of recent disappearances in the area of girls her age. When people she knows begin to go missing, the supernatural powers unleashed on her 18th birthday adds a dramatic added dimension to how she and the women around her deal with living in a world where such nightmarish things can happen.

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Reviews 

CONSECRATION – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , ,

Riffing in some ways on director Christopher Smith’s cult favourite Triangle (2009), Consecration once again finds him in time-bending horror territory as he combines a complex story that weaves between past, present and future into a film that shares the same fascinations with organized religion as his most recent 2020 feature, The Banishing. Smith and his collaborators here click beautifully with the material making it one of his strongest films in years.

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Festivals Reviews 

WHERE IS THE LIE? (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Where Is The Lie? is a vibrant bubblegum-colored dramedy about transphobia and social media based – shockingly – on a real-life story that went viral on Twitter. Filipino director Quark Henares knows a lot about how to make a film pop. The extraordinary performance of EJ Jallorina, a trans actress, is the heart and soul of the movie. A well-known child star in the Philippines, much of Jallorina’s life has played out in public, with significant personal milestones all taking place under the public eye. She surely knows first hand the power and pressure of social media on young trans women in this region.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE GIRL WHO WAS CURSED (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , ,

The brainchild of writer/director Zara Dwinger, the film follows the eponymous Gizem (Sinem Kavus), a Turkish-Dutch stoner who has let pretty much her whole damned life go to seed after quitting music school and losing interest in everything except for getting high and spying on her neighbours from her apartment through her trusty binoculars. The Girl Who Was Cursed is an elegant, eloquent micro-noir with a dark comic flavor, the perfect US calling card for both Dwinger and Kavus who are very much names to watch.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE UNDERBUG (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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It’s the evening before Independence Day in India, an event that plays a significant although subtle backdrop to the events that unfold in Shujaat Saudagar’s gripping supernatural chamber piece The Underbug. While the radio talkback shows that pepper the film in the background feature a steady flow of callers chatting with the host about what “freedom” means to them, we have already, at the outset of the film, learned that not everyone is feeling so celebratory. Riots have broken out with terrifying violence permeating some areas, and people are warned to stay indoors.

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Festivals Reviews 

A PERFECT DAY FOR CARIBOU (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , ,

Writer/producer/director Jeff Rutherford has crafted a surprisingly powerful and deeply moving portrait of three generations of broken men. A masterclass in a film that looks simple but is in fact anything but, A Perfect Day for Caribou is an unmissable highlight of the 2023 Slamdance festival

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Festivals Reviews 

NEW RELIGION (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , ,

It takes mere moments for Keishi Kondo’s feature debut New Religion to pull you in and drag you under. An unrelenting, drone-heavy soundtrack throbs, amplifying the already fever-pitch intensity of the red-drenched onslaught of abstract imagery that cluster and cling together, rendering the film’s pre-credit sequence an experience all on its own. New Religion is an aggressive slow burn of a movie – it knows where it’s going and it confidently takes its time to get there, knowing the journey is as crucial here as the destination.

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Reviews 

NUT JOBS (Slamdance 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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The plot is convoluted, sure, but deliberately so, as all of its seemingly disparate threads weave together nicely as the film hurtles towards its outrageous conclusion. This is low-budget filmmaking at its finest; it’s joyful, it’s ambitious, and it’s precisely the kind of film that Slamdance has built its reputation on showcasing. Nut Jobs welcomes you to be a part of its in-joke, an invitation that you will either accept heartily or resist, and poor fool you if you opt for the latter – this film is an indie delight.

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