Oliver Weir

Oliver Weir

1,301Films

70Following

67Followers

Film critic for The Film Stage, The Playlist and Screen Anarchy

UK

Favorite films

  • The Gold Rush
  • Céline and Julie Go Boating
  • A Moment of Innocence
  • L'Argent

Recent activity

All
  • Dahomey

  • Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

  • It's Not Me

  • Coma

Recent reviews

More
  • Dahomey

    Dahomey 2024

    Added

    From my Top 10 Films of 2024 feature for The Film Stage.

    Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, centres around the repatriation of 26 artifacts that were stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey (now part of modern-day Benin) during the period of French colonial rule. Blending materialist history with an ethereal visual style, Diop creates an incisive, astonishingly elegant study of postcolonial attitudes, cultural myth-making, and the legacy of Western domination in Africa, as well as one of the year’s most poignant meditations on the idea of places as processes.

  • Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

    Soundtrack to a Coup d'État 2024

    Added

    From my Top 10 Films of 2024 feature for The Film Stage.

    Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a blow-by-blow account of US plots in the 1950s and ’60s to maintain control of key uranium reserves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, undermine growing support for a United States of Africa, and, with the help of British and Belgian authorities, murder the Congo’s first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. The editing style—which takes inspiration from the CIA’s…

Popular reviews

More
  • Chronicles of a Wandering Saint

    Chronicles of a Wandering Saint 2023

    Added

    Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s charming, intelligent Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is a natural follow-up to the two short films for which he is known: Soy Buenos Aires (a strange, picaresque rags-to-riches tale) and Museum of Fleeting Wonders (a collection of dramatized paranormal happenings). In Chronicles, as in the two short films, he is primarily concerned with spiritual, ethical, and religious contrasts; scenarios in which miracles are mixed with coincidences, faith with rationality, and boredom with inspiration. But that is where…

  • The Zone of Interest

    The Zone of Interest 2023

    Added

    EVERYTHING FLOWS

    One of the recurring images in the film is that of still characters foregrounded against an endless lateral flux, signifying both the flow of time and a recursive historical guilt. In most cases the flux is represented by water, albeit in various states of symbolic and chemical purity: the shimmering lake; the river of human sediment; the purifying rain; and, as the ultimate state of pollution, the Stygian darkness of the final scene. This emphasis on water and…

Following

70
' ].join(''); if ( adsScript && adsScript === 'bandsintown' && adsPlatforms && ((window.isIOS && adsPlatforms.indexOf("iOS") >= 0) || (window.isAndroid && adsPlatforms.indexOf("Android") >= 0)) && adsLocations && adsMode && ( (adsMode === 'include' && adsLocations.indexOf(window.adsLocation) >= 0) || (adsMode === 'exclude' && adsLocations.indexOf(window.adsLocation) == -1) ) ) { var opts = { artist: "", song: "", adunit_id: 100005950, div_id: "cf_async_c35d904c-0cb0-470a-8f9d-7ff1f5bb89f0" }; adUnit.id = opts.div_id; if (target) { target.insertAdjacentElement('beforeend', adUnit); } else { tag.insertAdjacentElement('afterend', adUnit); } var c=function(){cf.showAsyncAd(opts)};if(typeof window.cf !== 'undefined')c();else{cf_async=!0;var r=document.createElement("script"),s=document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];r.async=!0;r.src="//srv.tunefindforfans.com/fruits/apricots.js";r.readyState?r.onreadystatechange=function(){if("loaded"==r.readyState||"complete"==r.readyState)r.onreadystatechange=null,c()}:r.onload=c;s.parentNode.insertBefore(r,s)}; } else { adUnit.id = 'pw-c35d904c-0cb0-470a-8f9d-7ff1f5bb89f0'; adUnit.className = 'pw-div'; adUnit.setAttribute('data-pw-' + (renderMobile ? 'mobi' : 'desk'), 'sky_btf'); if (target) { target.insertAdjacentElement('beforeend', adUnit); } else { tag.insertAdjacentElement('afterend', adUnit); } window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => { adUnit.insertAdjacentHTML('afterend', kicker); window.ramp.que.push(function () { window.ramp.addTag('pw-c35d904c-0cb0-470a-8f9d-7ff1f5bb89f0'); }); }, { once: true }); } } tag.remove(); })(document.getElementById('script-c35d904c-0cb0-470a-8f9d-7ff1f5bb89f0'));

Activity

All