Unrelated.

"As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw on Unrelated: "Writer-director Joanna Hogg learned her trade in TV, and this may look like a chamber piece at first glance. Actually, it's ambitious, big-screen stuff. Hogg has genuine cinematic artistry, and she has effortlessly absorbed what appear to be personal contacts, non-professionals and family friends into an intelligent and utterly involving film."

"With its overlapping conversations and contemplative moods, it feels significantly different from the British mainstream, clogged with romantic comedies, mockney gangster flicks and period adaptations," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "It is not only its setting that aligns it with European cinema; it has to do with the luminous sense of space and the stillness of the camera. If Hogg can render the travails of a bunch of middle-class British holidaymakers a subject of interest, there's reason to hope she has some career in the making."

"Family, class, mortality, ambition, desire: most of the biggies are present and correct." Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: "You can only be thankful that politics and religion aren't on the list, because Unrelated has tension to spare as it is." Even so, "There is a strain of wry humour in the portrait of the wealthy at play that recalls the social comedies of Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco)."

"[T]his is easily one of the most accomplished and unmissable new releases of 2008: a simple, supremely well-observed story of ordinary human emotions, with performances and dialogue that are, from the first scene to the last, painfully accurate and convincing," writes Neil Young. "The second cause for celebration: Unrelated is the first movie to appear under the auspices of distribution company New Wave Films. Such organisations are crucial for the survival and exposure of non-mainstream cinema, and their slate includes the latest by the Dardenne brothers and Claire Denis."

"Unrelated, in its understated, eye-catching fashion, is as arresting as any British debut feature since Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher and Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu.

"The story at first seems slight, and you wonder how it is going to be sustained," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "This is a drama that amounts to much more than the sum of its parts and, without doubt, is one of the best, and most original, British films of the year."

"Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out.

Four out of five stars from James Christopher in the London Times.

Kamera's Antonio Pasolini interviews Hogg.

Posted by dwhudson at September 19, 2008 1:19 AM