Rose Dymock

Alone in a dark cave, a man watches silently as a blood-red sun rises slowly from an underground lake, casting it’s golden light across the face of Clint (Willem Dafoe) as he travels an uncertain yet familiar landscape. It is one of many moments of beauty in a film that is unfortunately not much more than skin deep with it’s intentions.

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes in a major British city in the past decade, it is clear that homelessness and rough sleeping has dramatically risen since the Conservative/Liberal Democratic government introduced the era of austerity. Budget cuts hitting some of the most vital services, along with punitive changes to the benefit system have left many people barely able to get by.
In Marc Zammit’s labour of love Homeless Ashes, a film that took several years to crowdfund and make, which...

In the Northern Territory, the endless beauty stretches out for miles. Luscious trees and the calm, turquoise blue of a small lake are the home of Gutjuk (Jacob Junior Nayinggul), a young boy who yearns to be a hunter like his uncle Baywarra (Sean Mununggur) and the rest of family, all members of the Yolngu people. When two fugitives arrive seeking refuge, though, the police invade these peaceful surroundings and a massacre, led by Walter (Aaron Pedersen), ensues.
The violent attack is initia...

This article was written exclusively for The Film Magazine by Rose Dymock of rosedymock.com.
The D’Innocenzo Brothers’ triumphant return to Berlinale, with their second feature Bad Tales, is indicative of the kind of profile that festivals are able to give new and upcoming directors. Their first film, Boys Cry, played in Berlin in 2018 as part of the Panorama strand, while Bad Tales took its place among such directors as Kelly Reichdert and Abel Ferrera in competing for the Golden Bear, the f...

A car, wrecked and upside down on a strip of concrete, opens Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland — no movements or signs of life evident as smoke drifts gently into the sky. There is no depiction of the crash, just the aftermath of violence, a theme that continues throughout the punchy crime-thriller.
After Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is injured and her mother killed in the afore-mentioned crash, she is sent to live with her aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her three sons, with whom she’s had li...

My Little Sister does not have overly lofty ambitions. The German melodrama, directed by Swiss pair Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, is neither a sweeping, all-encompassing romance, nor an over-the-top look at a family in disarray, but something much quieter: a contemplative examination of the redemptive, healing power of art in a semi-dysfunctional family dealing with illness.
Lisa (Nina Hoss), a playwright whose single success is increasingly feeling like a lifetime ago, has since giv...

Multi-hyphenate Riz Ahmed delivers a strong physical performance as a rapper struggling with a degenerative illness on the eve of his potential breakthrough into the mainstream. Whose move back to the family home triggers a reexamination of his own relationship with both his parents and his culture.
Zed (Ahmed), or Zaheer to his family, is on the brink of stardom. After a successful show in New York he is asked to support a large artist on his US tour, a break that has been long in the making...

Philippe Falardeau’s My Salinger Year (2020), starts it’s story forty years after the book’s publication. When aspiring writer Joanna (Margaret Qualley) leaves her California university and boyfriend behind, and gets a job as an assistant at a literary agency who boasts Salinger – or ‘Jerry’ as he is known to those in the office – as their highest profile client.
J.D Salinger is one of those authors that everyone had to study in English growing up. His most famous book, Catcher in the Rye, is...

Jia Zhang-ke’s love letter to the creative spirit that has emerged from his hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi Province is an in-depth examination of the lives of three different generations of writers, all of whom have been inspired by the countryside and rural life of the area. Split into eighteen, loosely connected ‘chapters’ (with titles such as “Love” and “Mother”), Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue delves into the lives of acclaimed Chinese writers Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong — exam...

When someone mentions 1940s and 50s style, you might instantly think of carefully curled and pinned hair, hourglass dresses, and perfectly winged eyeliner. The femme fatales of cinema’s film noir, and the iconic figure of Marilyn Monroe loom large in public imagination and the concepts of mid-twentieth century style.
Each year, Las Vegas is home to one of the largest rockabilly/vintage festivals in the world, the ‘Viva Las Vegas’ festival, which takes over an entire hotel complex in the middl...

Kevin Ward‘s slow burn thriller is a good example of how big names and budgets aren’t always needed to create an interesting and twisted film.
After the death of his wife Beth in a car accident that left him severely injured, Tom Alexander (Jonathan Mangum) is slowly attempting to rebuild his life. No longer wanting to drive, he joins the early morning train commuters, and strikes up a friendship with a fellow traveller. Aaron Clark (Tate Ellington) helps to gradually bring Tom out of his she...

Director Agnieszka Holland’s griping drama Mr. Jones hits UK cinemas tomorrow, starring James Norton (Gareth Jones), Vanessa Kirby (Ada Brooks) and Peter Sarsgaard (Walter Duranty) in a story about journalism, the search for the truth and the horrors of the Holodomor – the man‐made famine that devastated Ukraine in the winter of 1932‐33.
Zavvi spoke to director and Polish filmmaking icon Holland about the importance of truth, Norton’s excellent performance, and the perils of filming in Ukrain...

Meryam Joobeur‘s award-winning short film Brotherhood examines the microcosmic experience of an isolated farming family, living in the Tunisan countryside in the context of the current Syrian conflict. This international co-production is surprisingly and densely packed in its twenty-five minute run time, and with strong performances from professionals as well as non-actors means not a single one of those minutes is wasted.
A Family In Conflict
When Malek (Malek Mechergui), the eldest son of a...

Mark Jenkin‘s inventive and haunting new film Bait, set in a idyllic Cornish fishing village invaded by gentrification and middle-class Londoners, explores class solidarity and its reactions to violence in an unique film that expertly skewers the class divisions that play out in modern British society on microcosmic level.There are clear divisions sewn between those living in the village, whose livelihoods revolve around the industries present in their small town, who are slowly becoming pric...