The great Australian and international film critic, Adrian Martin, has shared his thoughts on the QFF 2015 program, picking his top five films.
Martin is the former film critic for The Age, editor of journals Rouge, LOLA and Screening the Past, and is a contributor to publications including Cineaste, Sight and Sound, and Film Comment. His books include Phantasms (1994), The Mad Max Movies (2003), and Mise en Scene and Film Style (2014).
Adrian Martin’s Top 5 at QFF:
1. Jealousy (Garrel, 2013) France
Garrel is among the very greatest living directors, and this sharp, compressed tale of human passions and misunderstandings is a perfect summation of his style and recurring obsessions. Brilliant performances by an ensemble cast.
2. The Colour of Pomegranates (Paradjanov, 1969) Soviet Union
It’s inscrutable, but utterly entrancing – Paradjanov’s gorgeous mythological cine-poem, at once sacred and profane, was decades ahead of its time. He suffered for his art greatly in his lifetime, but at last we can see it the way he intended.
3. Jauja (Alonso, 2014) Argentina
Remarkable leap forward for this director, combining his minimalist feel for landscape, story and character with magical realist elements – and Viggo Mortensen!
4. The Strange Little Cat (Zurcher, 2013) Germany
Australia thinks it invented ‘quirky’ cinema, but the crown must now go to this nutty, mesmerising little movie, which records every tiny, intimate catastrophe within a family’s daily life – especially as seen by its cat.
5. The Strange Colour of My Body’s Tears (Cattet, Forzani, 2013) Belgium
The respendid Italian ‘giallo’ horror-thriller genre has lived and died several times since the early 1960s, but now it’s in fully decadent retro flowering thanks the films of this Belgian duo, who stylise the form to within an inch of its achingly beautiful death.