British Council

An unconventional replication of the way we communicate in virtual medium, having each shot in a different style, Rate Me portrays a teen escort, Coco, through the prism of others’ trashy and peculiar comments. The directors succeeds to create a contradiction of terms between the critical segments of her clients or random people she met, lacking sympathy and offering a wide range of identities and endings which imply harshly some of their obscure desires. Its music backdrops follow an ironic and a potential political discourse in which the filmmaker wants to oblige us to pay fully attention to structural identity in a modern and virtual world where self-branding is available to each and every one of us and it’s also seen as a lifestyle. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled to Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton Sinclair. Eisenstein's sensual Mexican experience appears to have been pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the early successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made him a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar's Plot. (written by Peter Greenaway)

Set in Mexico during the '10 days that shook' Russia’s greatest silent filmmaker, Eisenstein in Guanajuato marks Peter Greenaway’s raucous attempt to capture his all-time cinema idol at his moment of greatest personal discovery and deepest professional frustration — which, the film takes great delight in suggesting, coincided with the loss of his virginity, at age 33, so far from his (still) homophobic homeland. Determined to breathe fresh life into a medium he insists has scarcely evolved in the 90 years since Sergei Eisenstein made Strike, Greenaway has wrought an outrageously unconventional and deliriously profane biopic that could take decades to be duly appreciated. (Peter Debruge, Variety)

Erotically charged and artfully crafted, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is the first of two titles devoted to portions of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s life, and proves Peter Greenaway has lost none of his edge. At the age of 72, British auteur filmmaker maintains his ability to amaze. Ever the provocative experimentalist, he belongs to a rare class of director, one who manages to delight and confound, challenge and dismay even into his later period of film making. There’s a perverse thrill to be had watching the daringness on display in this examination of a Russian legend that bluntly examines his sexual orientation in a way that would never be produced from his native country. (Nicholas Bell, ioncinema.com)