The simple fable-like story and brief running time belie a complex and thematically rich portrait of a mother and daughter in contemporary Chad. Amina (Souleymane) is a practicing Muslim and single mother living on the outskirts of the Chad capital N’Djam…
The second part of writer-director Joanna Hogg’s cinematic bildungsroman picks up where the last one left off. Film student Julie (Swinton Byrne), still numbed after the death of her upper-class junkie boyfriend, Anthony, is staying with her upper-middle …
So extraordinary are the details of this wildly enjoyable Benwell-set tale, based on real events, it seems unbelievable it is not better know. It’s 1961 and the magnificently-named Kempton Bunton (Broadbent) is a sixty-something working class bloke of no …
While there may not be too much that is new here to fans, this documentary about the comedic polymath, one of the major figures of the first half of the 20th century, is exceptionally-well assembled and features a range of fascinating archive footage. Cha…
Swiss writer-director Fred Baillif’s vérité-style Swiss drama is an unvarnished but empathetic portrait of the residents and social workers in a residential care home for teenage girls in Geneva - La Mif means ‘the fam’ or ‘the family’. The narrative is b…
Part one of Dennis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi opus Dune, the second version of the ‘unfilmable’ book to make it to the screen, doesn’t quite do justice to the classic novel, but it comes pretty close, and unlike Dav…
Tilda Swinton in airy, slightly distracted mode proves the perfect vessel for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s brand of wryly surreal, haunting and meditative cinema in this, his first picture outside his native Thailand. She is Jessica, an English botanist …
Director: Romola Garai Stars: Alec Secăreanu, Carla Juri, Imelda Staunton Actor Romala Garai’s debut directorial feature is an ambitious and technically accomplished but flawed horror picture. Tomas (Secăreanu from ‘God’s Own Country’) i…
Iranian writer-director Asghar 'The Separation' Farhadi's latest is another richly complex and quietly engrossing moral fable in which a small deception snowballs into a full-blown social media-enabled crisis. Amiable, soft spoken sign maker Rahim (Jadidi…
A middle-class family in meltdown (in New York) might not sound like the most promisingly original proposition, but director Karam’s adaptation of his own play distinguishes itself via fine performances and some unsettling atmospherics. Young couple Brigi…
Guillermo del Toro’s strengths often feel like weaknesses in this immaculately-realised but fussy and overlong remake of the classic 1947 film noir picture. Cooper is Stan Carlisle, a lowlife leading an itinerant lifestyle after torching a house in myster…
Shades of John Boorman’s wartime memoir ‘Hope and Glory’ and Woody Allen’s paean to family life ‘Radio Days’ in Kenneth Branagh’s shamelessly crowd-pleasing, but genuinely charming, funny and poignant semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in the titula…
Penélope Cruz always does her best work with Pedro Almodóvar, and her performance here, as a woman coming to terms with life-changing revelations, is possibly her best to date. She is Janis, a Madrid-based photographer having an affair with a married man,…
Those looking for insights into what made genius African-American choreographer Alvin Ailey tick may be disappointed, but Jamila Wignot’s documentary works beautifully as an almost impressionistic representation of the poetic and thrilling newness of the …
Director: Julia Docournau Stars: Agatha Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier French writer-director Julia Docournau’s follow-up to teen cannibal picture ‘Raw’ is an unapologetically extreme slice of pure cinema likely to inspire …
When it was announced that Stephen Spielberg was to direct a new cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s musical masterpiece ‘West Side Story, itself an NYC-set update of Romeo and Juliet playing out between the Latino and white c…
Cracking performances from Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are pretty much the sole reason for seeing this underwhelming biopic from wordy wordsmith Aaron Sorkin about comedienne and ‘I Love Lucy’ star Lucille Ball and her Cuban-American band leader husba…
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Co-written with Icelandic author Sjón, director Jóhannsson’s almost unquanitifiably strange feature debut, some twelve years in the planning, is a bizarre and unsettling but weirdly affecting dark fable that is likely to divide and/or just plain baffle au…
This lean, keenly-paced but substantive and compelling profile of US tennis legend Arthur Ashe, charts his career from comparatively conformist sporting figure to his political awakening and subsequent activism. Born in segregated Richmond Virginia in 194…
An eighteen-year-old transgender woman has a stormy reunion with her estranged dad in this sensitive and handsomely-rendered Belgian family drama meets road movie. Lola (Bollaers) lives in the city with her best friend Samir (Outalbali from ‘Sex Education…
Shot almost guerrilla-style then smuggled out of Iran after the writer-director was banned from filmmaking, Mohammad Rasoulof’s meditative picture consists of four separate segments revolving around the theme of capital punishment. The first titular episo…
Bickering, blind panic and being stuck in a confined space with people you don’t care for: all the seasonal traditions are honoured in this thrilling one-shot picture set in a high-end London restaurant on a busy night in December. Graham is Andy, a troub…
A schoolteacher finds her reputation and career in deep trouble after her husband uploads their sex tape to the internet during the COVID epidemic in writer-director Radu Jude’s almost unquantifiable picture, a pornographic satirical absurdist sitcom meet…
Artfully shot in black and white, graphic novelist and filmmaker Nine Antico’s Playlist is a hip and personal study of a Parisian twentysomething’s quest for fulfilment in love and work. Sophie, excellently portrayed by Sara Forestier, is a graphic artist…
It goes off the rails in the last act, but this sequel to 1984’s ‘Ghostbusters’ (but not its 1989 sequel evidently), helmed by the son of the original’s director, is at least superior to the grimly unfunny 2016 reboot. A brief prologue shows a familiar fa…
Adapted from the short story ‘Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain’ by Sudanese writer Hammour Ziada, director Amjad Abu Alala’s feature debut is a gorgeously-rendered if oblique fable of a young man haunted by a prophecy. Muzamil lives in a small Sufi v…
Starkly beautiful but a challenging watch, director Dénes Nagy’s accomplished debut, a WWII inaction picture, focuses mainly on the experience of one Hungarian officer in a unit charged with hunting down partisans for the Nazis while occupying a village …
Save for the odd scene there’s disappointingly little evidence of director Chloé ‘Nomadland’ Zhao’s rugged, soulful humanism in this bloated and muddled Marvel adaption. A scrolling text prologue, the first of several hefty exposition dumps, lays out how…
This adaptation of the Graham Swift novel tries hard but is never quite able to break the bonds of staid middlebrow period piece. It opens in 1920s Henley with Jane (Young) working for the Nivens, an upper-class couple devastated by the loss of both of th…
Set on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium, actor-presenter Reggie Yates' affable but busy debut directorial feature plays like a very British take on ‘American Graffiti’ as it charts one night in 1999 for a trio of eighteen-year old pals and gar…
Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams returns to the scuzzy crime world of his feature debut, ‘London to Brighton’ for this grisly violent revenge thriller with horror elements. Maskell is the titular character, an ex-hired heavy returning home after a ten…
High on style but running on empty for substance, Wright’s horror thriller is so derivative it feels more like curation than filmmaking, but crucially without the idiosyncratic tweak that a Tarantino would bring to the table. Jojo Rabbit’s Thomasin McKenz…
Following the sweeping swooning romance of masterpiece ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, this gentle family drama with fantasy elements initially feels slight, but its small scale and brief, seventy-two minute running time, belie something bittersweet and enc…
An air of exquisite melancholy hangs over this stately-paced adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story. Theatre actor and director Yūsuke (Nishijima) lives in Tokyo with his partner Oto (Kirishima) a TV screenwriter. They are content in their routines…
The best biopics often don’t concentrate on the big picture preferring, instead, to use one pivotal moment to illustrate their character. This portrait of Diana Spencer takes place over a three day period in the early 90s at Sandringham Estate, her last w…
This rockumentary wrapped in a mockumentary wrapped in a feature chronicles musician-actor turned director Carrie Brownstein’s (or a version of Brownstein) attempts to make a tour documentary for musician St. Vincent aka Annie Clark (or a version of Clark…
Anderson’s latest confection is a very busy anthology tribute to old-time publications a la The New Yorker and the disparate eccentrics who worked for them, set in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. If that name made you chuckle knowingly this …
Part one of Dennis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi opus Dune, the second version of the ‘unfilmable’ book to make it to the screen, doesn’t quite do justice to the classic novel, but it comes pretty close, and unlike Dav…
This documentary portrait of hugely influential East Coast rock band, Dinosaur Jr. is a kind of slacker soap opera that also serves as a snapshot of the late 80s/early 90s US alt rock scene. Hardcore musicians J. Mascis and Lou Barlow formed the band in A…
This being the last outing for Daniel Craig’s iteration of the 007, the stakes were always going to be pretty high. After an eighteen-month COVID delay, Bond is facing his greatest challenge yet; to Save Cinema Itself and get reluctant punters back in the…
While not an essential addition to canon, this prequel to TV’s ‘The Sopranos’ has enough going on to warrant a revisit (previsit?). It begins in the late 60s where New Jersey gangster Dickie Moltisanti (Nivola), uncle to Tony and future father of Christop…
Writer-director Marley Morrison’s feature debut is a low-key but amiable coming of age comic drama which charts a torturously familiar holiday for a squabbling family. It focuses on AJ, a socially conscious and self-conscious seventeen-year-old, about to …
This complex and deftly-executed Danish police thriller drama nods to U.S crime dramas as ‘Training Day’ and Assault on Precinct Thirteen while delivering some prescient social observations. It begins just after an incident in which police brutalise a ni…
Fashioned from Sparks brothers Ron and Russel Mael’s intended concept album, visionary French director Leos Carax’s crazed Cannes-opening musical, aims high, but is, alas, a leaden, glib and overlong misfire. It begins promisingly enough with Carax and Ro…
Sean Durkin’s long-awaited follow-up to his feature debut, 2011’s disturbing psychological drama ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ is an 80s-set depiction of familial breakdown with supernatural touches. Law is Rory, a brash working class London boy who has mad…
In her fifth feature film, Zaida Bergroth paints a charming and poised portrait of the illustrator Tove Jansson, most famously known as the creator of the Moomins. The film follows Tove from World War II to the mid-fifties, as she sets out to discover th…
This bracingly original debut from cowriter-director Michael Sarnoski debut walk a fine line between absurdism and realism, and comedy and complete earnestness. Consequently Nicolas Cage is a fitting lead. He is Robin, a reclusive grizzled loner who ha…
This clever and atmospheric horror is set in during video nasty hysteria of the tumultuous early 80s. The skilfully-mounted opening provides a context as outraged Tory MPs and concerned family value types voice their fears that films such as ‘Cannibal Hol…
‘Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It's kind of long but full of suspense’ begins this audacious adaptation of the 140-post tweet thread from A’Ziah King that became a viral smash when it dropped in 2015. The narration come…
A group of asylum seekers kill time on a remote Scottish island in this wistful and humane comedy drama from Scottish writer-director Sharrock After fleeing Syria in undisclosed circumstances, traumatised musician Omar (El-Masry) is placed in a ramshackl…
This melancholic and quietly devastating documentary charts the experiences of Björn Andrésen, the fifteen-year-old Swedish boy plucked from obscurity to play Tadzio, Dirk Bogarde’s object of desire in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Thomas Mann adaptation ‘Death…
Edgar Wright’s affectionate overview of the much-loved dizzyingly eclectic and eccentric art pop band Sparks’ fifty-year career and twenty-five album output is exhaustive and a little exhausting at 135 minutes. It runs chronologically as the amusingly wry…
As archly amusing as it was, Danish writer-director Jensen’s previous picture the Mads Mikkelsen-starring arch comedy ‘Men & Chicken’ could safely have been filed under the acquired taste category. This riotous follow-up, a dark and constantly surprising…
French writer-director-star Dupontel’s madcap comedy has been a huge box hit in France as well as a multi-Cesar award winner, but its charms may prove more elusive to British audiences. It begins promisingly in what is presumably the near future as IT se…
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