B.P. Flanagan

Much can be said about the cinema of the 2010s, from Oscars drama and the legacy of #MeToo to the dominance of Disney and emergence of streaming platforms in film distribution. The films driving and reacting to these forces are a varied bunch, and the same can be said of its directors. With the little hindsight 2019 offers, it is impossible to adequately quantify or give credit to the innumerable voices that have shaped cinema since 2010.
With that in mind, the ORWAV team have assembled for a...

In between previews of awards fare and highlights from the year’s festival circuit, each edition of the Ghent Film Festival delivers a focus on one nation. In recent years, Nordic and American independent cinema, Britain, France, Hungary, and Italy have all had the treatment. This year, the festival has turned to Spain. Alongside a main strand of contemporary Spanish cinema, comes a selection of older ‘Classics’, including a significant retrospective of Augustí Villaronga (°1953). The program...

With A Bread Factory, the American filmmaker Patrick Wang has delivered that rare thing: an independant epic. At 4 hours split across two films, its florid language, sprawling cast of characters and open heart is reminiscent of Robert Altman and Eugene O'Neill, with concerns both of the minute, and worryingly timeless.
Greta and Dorothea have run The Bread Factory community theatre in Checkford, upstate New York, for over 40 years. When a viral theatre company, May Ray, build a new theatre ne...

The best films at LFF 2019 fell under the radar. Correspondents Orla Smith and Ben Flanagan discuss their six favourites of the festival. Read more LFF coverage.
As the London Film Festival (LFF) isn’t home to many world premieres — we saw most of them back at Cannes and TIFF — it’s an opportunity to see a lot of smaller films. This year in particular, our LFF correspondents Orla Smith and Ben Flanagan were most taken with the films that took them off guard, those that haven’t garnered that m...

Orla Smith and Ben Flanagan pick their four favourite competition short films at the 2019 London Film Festival. Read more LFF coverage here.
Short films, so often overlooked, are always one of the most interesting elements of an film festival. Within short film strands you discover the great filmmakers of the future. At the 2019 London Film Festival, correspondents Orla Smith and Ben Flanagan picked out four standouts in the short film competition. These are both promises of great work to be ...

Bertrand Bonello talks about how he developed the story of Zombi Child, his process with actors, and how he navigates subjects like colonialism. The film is available on Mubi UK for a limited time.
Bertrand Bonello’s films divide. They often take two simultaneous ideological stances on hot-button issues, operating like an essay, each scene a counterargument to the previous one. In his ruthless depictions of prostitution (House of Tolerance, 2011), terrorism (Nocturama, 2016), and now, colonia...

What constitutes Italian cinema? Marco Bellochio’s The Traitor is so fundamentally Italian that its audience needs familiarity with the country’s history to get to the bottom of its dense text. Pietro Marcello’s remarkable Martin Eden took a novel that seemed fundamentally North American, and imbued it with a love for Italian culture that shifts the story’s entire soul. Yet one of the year’s most high profile Italian productions, Waiting for the Barbarians, would seem, at first glance, to hav...

In Pain Glory, Almodovar brings together fiction and biography to create a knotty self-portrait.
The cinema of Almodóvar has always been a melange of influences, from Fassbinder and telenovelas to Doris Day musicals. The director has kept hold of his post-Franco punk spirit, even through his development into a mature director renowned on the world stage. With Pain and Glory, which won raves at Cannes and a Best Actor trophy for Antonio Banderas, the titan of Spanish cinema turns those influen...

One of cinema’s strangest phenomena is the pedophile theme, arguably so prevalent as to be its own sub-genre. Deliberately walking headlong into moral taboo seems to be the modus operandi among the Gaspar Noé contingent of edgier art-cinema, in depicting a character’s struggle against their darkest urges. American entries into the genre like American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) and Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998) even rely on screwball comedy to make the audience sympathise with wretched behavio...

James Franco, a man with more advanced degrees than sense, a kind of anti-polymath who fails upwards at everything he tries, walks Candide-like through this world. Now reviled for his one-two punch of being accused of sexual harassment by one of his students the same week that his interminable bro-fest, the Tommy Wiseau biopic The Disaster Artist (2011) was released, he delivers unto us Zeroville.
Shot in 2014, but previously unreleased due to the bankruptcy of distributor Alchemy, Zeroville ...

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 — a sprawling, five-parter about an epidemic of female murders in a fictional Mexican city — features the remarkable centrepiece “The Part about the Crimes” — 300 pages clinically detailing the murders, delivered like a journalist’s report. In 2666’s unending stream of horror, and without any psychology that readers can parse through, Bolaño takes the crimes to a mythic level of spiritual decay. It’s not a whodunnit, its a reminder of death’s endless spe...

After finding a body in the endless Mongolian plains, a ‘Young Policeman’ (credited as such) charged with protecting the scene finds aid from a somewhat older herdswoman, Dinosaur, who masters the land but shuns intimacy. It’s Chinese director Wang Quan’an’s way of throwing a bone to those frustrated by Öndög’s depictions of female life in the sticks.
Initially, Öndög’s ethnographic imagery seems aimless, tailor made for European festival audiences with its long shots, rambling dialogue, and ...