Ambitious and inventive

Serving Cinema review of The Childhood of a Leader:

Ideas surrounding religion and masculinity, in relation to the boy, are seamlessly woven in to the subtext of the film’s narrative. Robert Pattinson also appears in a scene-stealing dual role cameo, one of which is pivotal in the film’s eerie climax.

As an examination of a child’s development from innocence to malevolence, set against the backdrop of the birth of fascism, The Childhood of a Leader may prove too abstract at times. As an exercise in mood and remarkably absorbing filmmaking, Corbet succeeds in making his mark as a director and leaving us eager to see what he does next.

http://servingcinema.com/2016/06/childhood-leader-movie-review-edinburgh-film-festival/
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Headstuff review: The Childhood of a Leader is being hailed by critics as a wildly ambitious and ingenious debut, balancing political satire with ominous dread and art-house horror effectively. Having worked with some of today’s most acclaimed directors (Haneke with Funny Games, Lars Von Trier with Melancholia), that talent appears to have rubbed off on the 27-year-old Corbet.

The film’s treatise on the birth of fascism and its “dispassionate view of human nature” have drawn comparisons to Haneke’s The White Ribbon but with a more lavish setting and a greater horror influence.

It sounds like an absolutely insane blend of influences and with a terrific international cast – Oscar-nominee Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Ireland’s own Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), Nymphomaniac’s Stacy Martin and Robert Pattinson (The Rover) – it could be the art-house movie of the year.

http://linkis.com/www.headstuff.org/20/YtzjR

Really thoughtful analysis:
https://estherwright.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/the-childhood-of-a-leader-a-composite-history-of-twentieth-century-fascism/ Excerpt:

The Childhood of a Leader: a composite ‘history’ of twentieth century fascism

I go to the cinema as often as I can but of late I rarely get interested or excited enough about a film to remember what I’ve seen a few days later, let alone want to blog about it (Case in point: Saw Woody Allen’s Cafe Society on Wednesday, was charmed enough at the time, but had forgotten about it by this weekend).

It’s something of an exception then to see a film that genuinely makes me leave the cinema wanting to talk about it, let alone wanting to go home and furiously Google it. The Childhood of a Leader is one of those films.

It’s the best kind of non-history historical film— those that aren’t real but use all of the most well-known history film powers of (in Robert Rosenstone’s words) compression, metaphor, and alteration, to allude to something that is; fictionalised, but very obviously and knowingly real. Its explicit intention is to collect all of the fragments of what we know about the birth and shaping of dictators and extremists (coincidence..?), throws in the question of nature versus nurture, to paint a (timely) portrait through an historical lens.

It’s a film that capitalises on all the things that you expect to see in these sorts of pop culture texts—whether you read it in terms of period drama or thinly-veiled horror—, all of the things we’ve been conditioned to think we are going to see in the childhoods of men who would become great ‘evil’. And yet it never rewards you— at least, not in the way you think it’s going to. It doesn’t answer questions or offer answers, it just is.

So yes, while most of the time the film does actually feel like “more of a mind-fvck than a historical drama”, it is also the latter in the best sort of postmodern way possible—its not real, but it’s real. Even so, it’s the kind of historical film that just sort of makes sense right now.
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