Author: James Partridge

Cannes 2016 Review: Paterson

Synopsis Paterson is a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey – they share the name. Every day, Paterson adheres to a simple routine: he drives his daily route, observing the city as it drifts across his windshield and overhearing fragments of conversation swirling around him; he writes poetry into a notebook; he walks his dog; he stops in a bar and drinks exactly one beer; he goes home to his wife, Laura. By contrast, Laura´s world is ever changing. New dreams come to her almost daily. Paterson loves Laura and she loves him. He supports her...

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Cannes 2016 Review: From the Land of the Moon

Synopsis Gabrielle comes from a small village in the South of France, at a time when her dream of true love is considered scandalous, and even a sign of insanity. Her parents marry her to José, an honest and loving Spanish farm worker who they think will make a respectable woman of her. Despite José’s devotion to her, Gabrielle vows that she will never love José and lives like a prisoner bound by the constraints of conventional post-World War II society until the day she is sent away to a cure in the Alps to heal her kidney stones....

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Cannes 2016 Review: The Handmaiden

Synopsis 1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl (Sookee) is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress (Hideko) who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle (Kouzuki). But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to elope with him, rob her of her fortune, and lock her up in a madhouse. The plan seems to proceed according to plan until Sookee and Hideko discover some unexpected emotions. Thoughts There were plenty...

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Cannes 2016 Review: I, Daniel Blake

Synopsis Daniel Blake, 59, has worked as a joiner most of his life in Newcastle. Now, after a heart attack and nearly falling from a scaffold, he needs help from the State for the first time in his life. He crosses paths with a single mother Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one-roomed homeless hostel in London has been to accept a flat in a city she doesn’t know some 300 miles away. Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy as...

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Cannes 2016 Review: Slack Bay

Synopsis Summer 1910. Several tourists have vanished on the beaches of the Channel Coast. Infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy soon gather that these mysterious disappearances take place in Slack Bay. There lives a community of fishermen. Among them evolves a curious family, the Brufort, lead by the father “The Eternal”, who rules as best as he can on his prankster bunch of sons, especially the impetuous Ma Loute. Towering high above the bay stands the Van Peteghems’ mansion. Every summer, this degenerate bourgeois family stagnates in the villa, not without mingling during their leisure hours with the local people....

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